All things must pass and all things change

Posted on by LSN 18 Comments

Kami-cat has left us.

She was a snuggly, loving friend.  She tried very hard to be a good sport about things that were difficult for her, including many changes she didn't understand.  But at each stage, she had (we think) a good life. The last part was hard, but it's over now.

I'm going to choose to remember her proudly bringing a very large bird into the house only a few weeks ago.  We don't really think she hunted it herself (although she was fierce and strong when she was younger), but we let her think she fooled us.

I have a pile of work not done and a pile of unanswered questions from many of you, too.  I don't much feel like writing anything extensive today, but it is Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for many things, including the friendship of my team and the people who write to me from this blog. 

So, I will quickly answer Tenchy, who would like to know how to follow my instructions for applying XSLT to an RDL in the vastly-changed dialogs supplied with Report Designer 2008.  As he says "I don't see a Data Output tab in the newer version.", and this is true, the dialog I wrote about in that walkthrough is no longer present.  But the capability is still there:

… and of course the ability to do this is still based in the RDL schema, which includes this in the updated version: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Report 
xmlns:rd=http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQLServer/reporting/reportdesigner 
xmlns=
http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition>
  <Body>
    <Height>2in</Height>
    <Style />
  </Body>
  <Width>6.5in</Width>
  <Page>
    <LeftMargin>1in</LeftMargin>
    <RightMargin>1in</RightMargin>
    <TopMargin>1in</TopMargin>
    <BottomMargin>1in</BottomMargin>
    <Style />
  </Page>
  <DataTransform>x.xslt</DataTransform>
  <rd:ReportID>c6393baa-3c07-4d3d-a47d-15699770ddbe</rd:ReportID>
  <rd:ReportUnitType>Inch</rd:ReportUnitType>
</Report>

Tenchy would also like to know whether the technique shown in that post will allow him to get the Excel sheet names based on some data in a subreport.  This will depend on what data he's talking about.  The subreport output is contained in the XML, just like the "main" report, because it's part of the report output.  (You will see nodes like this 

<Report Name="AggSumsSubReport"></Report>

… with the details of the subreport contained in them.) However, if the layout controls that Tenchy wants to leverage are in the subreport page header or page footer, they won't be available, same as the main report.

Same as it ever was.  And yet, somehow, all changed.