Behavior Changes to SQL Server Reporting Services in SQL Server 2012

This topic describes behavior changes in Reporting Services. Behavior changes affect how features work or interact in SQL Server 2012 as compared to previous versions of SQL Server.

In this topic:

• SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

• SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

• SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

This section describes behavior changes to Reporting Services SharePoint mode.

View Items permission will not download Shared Datasets (SharePoint Mode)

New Behavior: Users with the SharePoint permission of “View Items” can no longer download the contents of Reporting Services shared datasets. This behavior change is now consistent with the “View Items” permissions for reports, data sources, and models. Users with “View Items” permission can view and execute reports, data sources, and models but they cannot download their content.

Previous Behavior: Users with the “View Items” SharePoint permission could download the contents of Reporting Services shared datasets.

For more information on SharePoint permission levels, see User permissions and permission levels

Report Server trace logs are in a new location for SharePoint mode (SharePoint Mode)

New behavior: For a report server installed in SharePoint mode, the report server trace logs will be under %Programfiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Web Services\ReportServer\LogFiles.

Previous Behavior: Report Server trace logs were found under a path similar to the following: %Programfilesdir%\Microsoft SQL Server\<RS_instance>\Reporting Services\LogFiles

GetServerConfigInfo SOAP API is no longer supported (SharePoint Mode)

New behavior: Use PowerShell cmdlet “Get-SPRSServiceApplicationServers”

Previous Behavior: Customers could develop SOAP client code to communicate directly with the Reporting Services end point, and call GetReportServerConfigInfo().

Report Server Configuration and Management Tools

Configuration Manager is not used for SharePoint Mode

New behavior: The Reporting Services Configuration Manager no longer supports SharePoint Mode report servers. Configuration of Reporting Services SharePoint mode can now be completed by using SharePoint Central administration and therefore Reporting Services Configuration Manager no longer supports SharePoint mode. Configuration Manager is now only used for Native mode report servers.

You cannot change the server from one mode to another

New behavior: You cannot change server modes. If you install a report server as Native mode you cannot change or re-configure it to be SharePoint mode. If you install in SharePoint mode, you can change the report server to native mode.

Previous Behavior: Customer installs a Reporting Services report server in SharePoint mode. If the customer wants to switch the report server to Native mode, they could open the Reporting Services configuration manager to switch to Native mode by either creating a new or connecting to an existing Native mode database. The customer could also use Reporting Services Configuration Manager to switch from SharePoint mode to Native mode.

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SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

This section describes behavior changes in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services.

Note

Because SQL Server 2008 R2 is a minor version upgrade of SQL Server 2008, we recommend that you also review the content in the SQL Server 2008 section.

SecureConnectionLevel Property in the Reporting Services WMI Provider Library

In the WMI provider library for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, the SecureConnectionLevel property allows values of 0,1,2,3, with 0 indicating that Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is not required for any of the Web service methods, 3 indicating that SSL is required for all the Web service methods, and 1 and 2 indicate subsets of Web service methods that require SSL. In SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, these values will have only two possible meanings:

• 0 indicates SSL is not required for any of the Web service methods.

• A positive integer indicates SSL is required for all the Web service methods.

This change affects how the report server responds to Web service calls. For example, ListSecureMethods now returns nothing if SecureConnectionLevel is set to 0 and all the methods in ReportingService2005 if SecureConnectionLevel is set to 1, 2, or 3.

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SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Behavior Changes

This section describes behavior changes in SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.

Report Server Configuration and Management Tools

Report Authoring

Report Processing

Report Rendering

Behavior Changes for Report Server Configuration and Management Tools

Reporting Services includes several tools and applications that you use to configure the server and manage content and operations. In this release, each tool is aligned to a specific purpose: configuration, administration, and content management. To promote consistency within a tool and to remove overlapping functionality, features and tasks have been added and removed from tools. If you were accustomed to using a tool to perform a given task, you might now need to use a different tool to accomplish the same task.

Feature	Description
Reporting Services Configuration	Color-code status icons have been removed. New URL configuration pages replace the pages for creating virtual directories. The workflow for creating and configuring a report server database has been revised. You now use a wizard to create or update database connection.
SQL Server Management Studio	Management Studio supports only server administration tasks. You can connect to and configure a report server that runs in native mode or in SharePoint integrated mode.
Report Manager	Report Manager is used to view and manage report server content. This release introduces the ability to manage report models. You can now set model item security and associate clickthrough reports to entities in a model. When viewing a report in Report Manager, because of the changes introduced by on-demand report processing, the toolbar displays a page estimate with a question mark instead of the actual number of pages for a report. You can still click the Last Page button and navigate to the end of the report.

Tasks Supported by Tools

Tasks	Report Server Configuration	Management Studio	Report Manager	Command line utilities
Reserve URLs	X			X
Set the service account and password	X			X
Create the report server database or change connection information	X			X
Configure report server scale-out	X			X
Back up, restore, change keys or delete encrypted data	X			X
Configure unattended execution account	X			X
Configure report server e-mail	X
Enable My Reports		X
Enable logging on report execution		X
Enable client-side printing		X
Set server defaults for report history		X
Create or modify role definitions		X
View status of a running report or model process and stop it if it is taking too long		X
Grant permissions to report server items and operations by creating role assignments at the item and system level			X
Define and manage the report server folder hierarchy			X
View reports, report models, shared data sources, resources, and folders			X
Upload report definition (.rdl), report model (.smdl), and resource files			X
Create and manage shared schedules		X	X
Create and manage linked reports			X
Create and manage report history			X
Create and manage shared data sources, and any data source properties defined in an individual report			X
Schedule when data processing occurs for a report or configure a report to run as a report execution snapshot			X
Subscribe to report deliveries and create and manage data-driven subscriptions			X
Create data-driven subscriptions			X
Use Report Builder to create, modify, and save reports			X
Generate models, associate clickthrough reports to entities in a model, and set model item security			X

Report Authoring

In earlier versions of Reporting Services, the four data regions (Table, Matrix, List, and Chart) were distinct report items with their own layout behavior and properties. In this release of Reporting Services, the Table, Matrix, and List data regions have been replaced by a new flexible grid layout called a Tablix data region that uses predefined templates to create the former data regions. The Tablix data region enables you to combine aspects of tables and matrices into flexible report layouts. The Chart data region remains a separate report item. New chart types, such as Polar, Radar, and Funnel, have been added to the Chart data region. For more information about the new chart types, see Charts (Report Builder and SSRS). For more information about the Tablix data region, see Tables, Matrices, and Lists (Report Builder and SSRS).

Preserving White Space in a Report Body or Rectangle Container

Extra white space is no longer removed by default. When you render a report that had extra white space on the report body when viewed on the report design surface, the trailing white space after the last report item on the page is preserved. This may result in more pages for an existing report. To remove the white space, set the report property ConsumeContainerWhitespace to true.

Report Processing

Report processing has been redesigned in SQL Server 2008. Reports are now processed and rendered page by page as a report user interactively reads through a report. The amount of data on each page influences the rendering time for each page. The total number of pages is determined when a report is rendered. For some renderers, an estimated number of pages is displayed until all pages in a report have been rendered.

Images

Images are no longer retrieved during the initial session when a report is rendered. Images are retrieved when they are accessed for the first time during on-demand processing.

For history and execution snapshots, images are retrieved at snapshot creation time.

Execution Log: TimeDataRetrieval, TimeProcessing, TimeRendering

Report log entries for TimeDataRetrieval, TimeProcessing, and TimeRendering are logged at the initial request to the report processor.

Error Detection on Export

In earlier versions of Reporting Services, the entire report was processed before any page could be viewed. Errors in expressions for the Visibility.Hidden RDL property were detected before a report could be exported. If you could view the first page of a report, you could export the entire report without error.

In this release, reports are processed page-by-page. If errors exist in an expression for the Visibility.Hidden RDL property, the error may not be detected until the page on which the error exists is rendered for export. In this case, the entire export fails. Being able to view a few pages of a report successfully does not guarantee that you can export the entire report. You must try to export the report and wait for a successful completion before you know that the report exports without error.

Expression evaluation for group, sort, and filter operations continue to behave in the same way as previous Reporting Services versions. Errors in these expressions are detected by the report processing component, and are reported as critical errors before the first page of a report is rendered.

Report Rendering

Report rendering redesign has introduced the following behavior changes when rendering an existing report.

Page Breaks

In earlier versions of Reporting Services, soft page break renderers handled report items in a container (in a rectangle or in the report body) in the following way: page breaks from the top-most and bottom-most report items were applied to the container in order to minimize extra blank pages. In the new rendering object model, page breaks that you set on report items, known as logical page breaks, always cause a new page to be rendered. No attempt is made to eliminate extra pages.

For more information, see Pagination in Reporting Services (Report Builder and SSRS).

RepeatWith Items

In earlier versions of Reporting Services, soft page break renderers included report items on a page when the RepeatWith property was set to true. These report items were not counted when calculating page size because of the flexible nature of page size for a soft page break renderer, nor were they counted when you set InteractiveHeight to control the amount of data on a page. In SQL Server 2008, these items will be counted toward the total page size. The result is that pages may contain less data, but setting the value for InteractiveHeight has more influence on the page size.

For more information, see Rendering Behaviors (Report Builder and SSRS).

Nested Subreports and Data Regions in Excel

In earlier versions of Reporting Services, nested data regions and subreports in table and matrix cells were not supported when you exported a report to Microsoft Office Excel. In SQL Server 2008, this limitation has been removed. You can design reports that use nested data regions and subreports in a data region, export the report to the Excel renderer, and view the nested report items.

For more information, see Exporting to Microsoft Excel (Report Builder and SSRS).

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See Also

Concepts

What's New (Reporting Services)

Deprecated Features in SQL Server Reporting Services in SQL Server 2012

Discontinued Functionality to SQL Server Reporting Services in SQL Server 2012

Breaking Changes in SQL Server Reporting Services in SQL Server 2012