SSRS has some standard formatting options predefined, yet they seemed to have left out a couple of commonly used ones.
1. Formatting currency with no cents. To do this, in the column expression field put in =FormatCurrency(Fields!column1.Value, 0). The 0 means we want no decimal places to be shown.
2. Show a number with commas, no decimal places, and a zero if the value is zero. One way to do this is to set the formatting properties to #,### but if the numbers value is zero it will show nothing. So we would want to use #,##0 to show a zero if neccesary.
Category Archives: SSRS
Failed Job Steps That Didn’t Notify An Operator
I often use jobs that have numerous steps. One example would be a job that has some initial prep work, multiple steps that run similar code on separate databases for multiple stores, and then finally some cleanup steps. I break the job down to individual steps per store so that if one of the steps fails, they all don’t fail. To do this, go to the advanced tab of the job step properties and set the ‘On failure action:‘ to ‘Go to the next step’. This allows the job to continue processing if there is an error on one of the steps. However, now it raises the question of how do we know if a step failed within a job? Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t have built in failure notification for steps like they do with the overall job. You can view the job’s history and see if a step failed by the yellow icon, but that is not practical to check every day especially if you have multiple jobs setup this way. A better solution is to use the code below which shows jobs that recently had failed steps and did not notify an operator. It can be handy to setup in a SSRS report to keep an eye on all of your jobs that had failed steps.
-- FAILED JOB STEPS THAT DIDN'T NOTIFY AN OPERATOR VIA EMAIL
USE msdb
GO
DECLARE @DateStringToday VARCHAR(8);
DECLARE @DateStringYesterday VARCHAR(8);
SET @DateStringToday = convert(varchar, getdate(), 112);
SET @DateStringYesterday = convert(varchar, getdate()-1, 112);
SELECT
job_name = sj.name,
sj.enabled,
sjh.step_id,
sjh.step_name,
sjh.sql_message_id,
sjh.sql_severity,
sjh.message,
sjh.run_status,
sjh.run_date,
sjh.run_time,
sjh.run_duration,
operator_emailed = so.name
FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobhistory as sjh
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysjobs_view sj ON sj.job_id = sjh.job_id
LEFT OUTER JOIN msdb.dbo.sysoperators so ON (sjh.operator_id_emailed = so.id)
WHERE sjh.run_status = 0
AND sjh.run_date IN(@DateStringToday, @DateStringYesterday) -- show today and yesterday
AND sj.enabled = 1 -- make sure it's enabled
AND sj.category_id != '101' -- remove SSRS report process jobs
AND so.name IS NULL -- show jobs that didn't already email an operator
ORDER BY sjh.run_date DESC, sjh.run_time DESC
SSRS export to piped CSV
Reporting Services has a comma delimited export option. But what if you need to export a pipe delimited? The code below show’s you how to do this. Edit your rsreportserver.config file which can be found somewhere like C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportServer. (your MSSQL.3 may vary depending on where Reporting Services was installed)
Add the following code to the end of the Render section:
<Render>
…
<Extension Name=”PIPE” Type=”Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.CsvRenderer.CsvReport,
Microsoft.ReportingServices.CsvRendering”>
<OverrideNames>
<Name Language=”en-US”>CSV (pipe delimited)</Name>
</OverrideNames>
<Configuration>
<DeviceInfo>
<FieldDelimiter>|</FieldDelimiter>
<NoHeader>True</NoHeader>
</DeviceInfo>
</Configuration>
</Extension>
…
</Render>
In my case I didn’t want any table headers. You can look over the list of available options here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms155365.aspx
If you want your file extension to be .txt instead of .csv then add this line in the DeviceInfo section: <Extension>txt</Extension>
Now you need to restart SSRS. In my experiences just restarting the service doesn’t force it to look at the config file for changes. I have to go into Reporting Services Configuration Manager and make a change within there for it to re-read the config file. I usually go to Email Settings and change the SMTP Server, hit apply, change it back, and hit apply again. Now click on Server Status, Stop, Start. Open up your report via the Reporting Services web page and you should now have a CSV (pipe delimited) export option!
SSRS Failed Subscription Notifications
Reporting Services can email reports to end users on a regular basis without allowing them access to the web portal. This gives you a little more control over the report and can make it easier for the end user. One problem is that with numerous reports scheduled with numerous parameters to numerous recipients it can be difficult to know if/when a report failed to be sent. It looks bad when the VP keeps asking why he didn’t get his report today.
SSRS subscriptions are very picky. If you have one invalid email address in a subscription with multiple recipients, the whole subscription fails and nobody gets the report. Likewise, if one of your report parameters changed the report will not be sent. Surprisingly there isn’t an out of the box solution to see what reports failed to run.
Here is a query I wrote that checks SSRS subscriptions and returns any failed reports. Use the database you setup for Reporting Services. (default is ReportServer)
SELECT C.Name, S.LastRunTime, S.LastStatus, S.Description
FROM Subscriptions AS S
LEFT OUTER JOIN [Catalog] AS C
ON C.ItemID = S.Report_OID
WHERE LEFT (S.LastStatus, 12) != ‘Mail sent to’
AND LEFT (S.LastStatus, 12) != ‘New Subscrip’
The first time I ran this we had 4 reports that had failed and we weren’t aware of it! I’ve set this up as an SSRS report and view it daily, and have it emailed to me so I know all my reports were sent.
SoCalSQL - Jeff Prom's SQL Server Blog 