Management - Level 9 in the Stairway to Reporting Services

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Management - Level 9 in the Stairway to Reporting Services

Jessica M. Moss

SSC Eights!

Points: 986
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May 23, 2012 at 12:02 am

#256849

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Management - Level 9 in the Stairway to Reporting Services

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Tom_Sacramento SSCertifiable Points: 6292 More actions · Answer 1

Hi Jessica,

Thank you for putting all this information into one place - you have helped me a whole lot, and I'm sure plenty of other folks have benefited.

Congratulations on a job well done

Tom 🙂

Tom in Sacramento - For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/

R.P.Rozema SSChampion Points: 12317 More actions · Answer 2

One thing I see hardly addressed in SSRS is translations. i.e. provide the same data to different users in the same layout but all fixed texts on the report are changed into the users' preferred language. The way most people seem to go at this is to write a copy of the same report for each language and have the end user select the report in their language. There surely must be better ways to do this if the only thing that changes between the copies is the text on the labels, captions and fixed text boxes, plus the format of the dates and numbers. Can anyone of you more experienced SSRS developers share your opinions/knowledge on this topic too?

I've seen so far some examples that employ a CLR routine included in the report to lookup from a resource the translation for each text value. But since we've already got a data source, I would much rather retrieve the translations from the db and replace all fixed texts on-the-fly just before rendering the document.

I'd especially like to see some solution that -just before rendering the output document- automatically finds all texts from the report definition (rdl?), passes those texts to a procedure in the database (as an xml?), retrieves all translations available and then for each translation found replaces the fixed text by the translated text, to then have a document rendered in which all labels, header and footer texts, captions, etc. are in the end-users' language of choice. All from one and the same report definition. This scenario has some big advantages: for example we need to test the document only once to see that the report is functionally correct and need not redo it all again after yet another translation is added/changed. Same for deployment onto various environments, it only needs to be done once per environment. And no longer do we need to wait for all languages "official" translations to arrive before we can start developing, testing or even deploying the report...

Here's an excellent blog by Brian Welcker close to what I intend to get to. The main thing this solution still lacks however is finding all texts from the report definition and replace them automatically. Does anyone have some (links to) examples on how this can be done?

Posting Data Etiquette - Jeff Moden[/url]
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
Hidden RBAR - Jeff Moden[/url]
Cross Tabs and Pivots - Jeff Moden[/url]
Catch-all queries - Gail Shaw[/url]

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

davebrigitte SSC Rookie Points: 41 More actions · Answer 3

Great job on this 9 step program!

Is the source code available anywhere???

much appreciated...

D@veE