Throwing like a girl

Throwing like a girl: "The most fun I have had (so far) researching a magazine article was 11 years ago, for an Atlantic piece called 'Throwing Like a Girl.'"

RS Log Files

(MDSN/BOL) Reporting Services Log Files
What info ends up in which log files. Usually you'll want to watch one of three:

• the Execution Log shows report run info
• the Windows Application log shows error info
• the Trace Logs can show loads of detail (if tracing is enabled)

(MSDN) Querying Report Execution Log Data
It's a pretty straight-forward database. If you intend to query it a lot you should probably take the time to copy the data off to a long-term store. You don't want your queries to mess with RS performance, and there can be a lot of writing to these tables.


Here's a sample query to pull back a bunch of results from the Execution Log.

declare @startdate datetime
declare @enddate datetime
declare @pathroot varchar(99)

set @startdate = '2008-04-01'
set @enddate = '2008-08-01'
set @pathroot = '/pub/dir1/'

select c.name, c.path, el.timestart, el.username, el.parameters, el.status, el.[rowcount]
from dbo.ExecutionLog el
join dbo.Catalog c on el.reportid = c.itemid
where el.timestart >= @startdate
and el.timeend <= @enddate and c.path like @pathroot + '%' order by timestart desc

In this example we're looking at ther results for every report in the /pub/dir1 directory and every directory under it. You can set the pathroot to / to retrieve info on every report on the server .

Add Report Templates to VS05

To add new report templates to Visual studio just copy a report to the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject (no line wrap)

Dates in RS

To change July 2008 into 200807 use the following SQL

select datepart(year,mydate) * 100 + datepart(mm,mydate)

To change July 17, 2008 into 20080717

select datepart(year,mydate) * 10000 + datepart(m,mydate) *100 + datepart(d,mydate)

The DateDiff, DateAdd and DatePart VBScript Functions
(from codefixer.com)

MSDN: Custom Date String syntax
Use these in the Format field on the Properties for the textbox you want to clean up.