Tech Ed Africa is almost here

Well , we’re less than a month away from Tech-Ed Africa. That’s right , the event now covers the entire continent and is set to be the biggest Tech-Ed yet. So big , in fact , that a venue and city change was necessary. This years Tech-Ed will be held at the ICC in Durban. We’ve got more tracks, more speakers and more sessions. Speaking of which ( pardon the pun ) , I’ll be presenting 2 sessions on Reporting Services, as well as sit in on the BI Power Hour.

 

My Sessions :

Report Authoring with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Explore the SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Designer tool. This session is a walkthrough of the many enhancements in the new release. Learn about some of the new Report Designer usability features, how to add data visualizations with Gauges, build complex structures with Tablix, and build richly-formatted Textboxes.

Code: BIN201 Level: 200 – Intermediate Presenter: Thavash Govender Day: 04 August 2008, 09:15 – 10:30 Audience: Dev Location: Session Room 11

New Data Visualization Techniques with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Advances in charting, KPI, and dashboard representations are leading some of the key innovations in Business Intelligence and helping users make sense of the mountains of data they deal with every day. The Reporting Services team recently made some great investments in this area. Come see how to lighten up your reports with new visual styles.

Code: BIN301 Level: 300 – Advanced Presenter: Thavash Govender Day: 05 August 2008, 08:00 – 09:00 Audience: Dev Location: Session Room 11

OK , so I’ll see you guys there. For those of you who can’t make it, I’ll be posting stuff on my blog after the sessions. Gavin and Shivani are also doing BI sessions , in fact there’s going to be ALOT of BI stuff at this Tech-Ed, so if you haven’t registered yet what are you waiting for ??

How to extract a report from the report server

This one comes up alot. You have some reports on a production Reporting Services server. For some reason, you don’t have or don’t have access to the source code any more. Can you extract the RDL from the Reporting Server ?

 

Well yes you can. I’ve heard various theories on how you can get it from the database , but there’s a much simpler way. On the Report Properties page, you will see a section further down the page called Report Definition. Here there are 2 options, Edit and Update.

 

 If you click on Edit , you will get a dialog allowing you to save the actual RDL file.

 

You can then edit this file in Visual Studio ( or even Notepad !!  ) and re-deploy to the server. Do this for all the reports and you could re-create the solution and back up your source code. The Update option allows you upload a new RDL to replace the report in the Report Catalog.