June 18, 2012

SSRS Division Helper App. Avoid errors in division result. (SQL Server Reporting Services)

A quite common issue in SSRS is getting properly displayed values when dividing 2 numbers. When the denominator is equal to 0 or NULL you get an ugly looking error or “Infinity” in the field. Not really what the customer would like to see.
A well known solution is when dividing A / B to do something like this:
= IIF(  IsNothing( B )
        OR B = 0,
        0,
        A
        /
        IIF( IsNothing( B )
            OR B = 0,
            1,
            B
        )
)

Writing this each and every time gets a little annoying. With the not so good code editor in BIDS when we have complex expressions instead of “A” and “B” it can actually be very frustrating and unnecessarily time consuming.
Having to do this over and over again I made a small and very simple tool I would like to share.
image
All you need to do is put the required values in the top and bottom. Click [Generate] and copy the result.
It saves some time and I hope someone finds it useful.
Download from here.
Source (VS 2010)

June 1, 2012

CRM Online Reports – visible previously internal parameters not showing up

Simple use case – I wanted to update a existing report setting a couple of report parameters to visible, which were previously set to internal. It showed up nicely in Visual Studio but although I updated the report a couple of times in CRM Online the report parameters were still not visible. I made sure the report itself was actually updated by adding some dummy text to it, but the parameters stayed hidden. It looked like the report parameter settings in SSRS weren’t really refreshing during the update.
The solution I found was actually quite simple. I deleted the report and uploaded it once again. Then the report parameters showed up nicely. It’s not rocked science but might come in handy for someone.