Allow development of SSRS Reports Offline

Here’s the documentation.report definition.pdf (1.7 MB)

… Most of the work that MS has done with SSRS reporting is integrating with Power BI and their Web Portal, so it doesn’t benefit Epicor users as much.

The question for me is, how much “report writing” are we doing? I use SSRS mostly for forms. My users want to do more analysis which is dashboards and drill-down kind of things…

Yes, we haven’t really benefited from the updates MS has done to SSRS, they haven’t really touched the Report Builder for awhile.

Your second point is also valid, SSRS for us too is static forms. Our users also want more ability to drill-down into the data so we’ve build many more dashboards than custom SSRS form reports.

We’re also looking at the EDA module for analytics.

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Use visual studio. Many more options which is why they have not changed report builder. Enhancement are made to visual studio BI tools instead.

The best report programmers I have had never touch report builder unless it is text change.

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Something may have changed recently? Cause the last time I used visual studio for ssrs it was exactly the same

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Maybe I am missing something and I fully expect to get flamed for now working within the framework but…

When I got up to speed with E10 and SSRS I did a lot of Epicor University tools CBT - the SSRS one, which seemed to still be for E9 had a specific instruction for creating a brand new SSRS report using SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio using an SQL query not an RDD and creating a custom data source to connect to SQL - in fact there are several worked examples in this material where you do this. Cutting to the chase you can go straight to the SSRS report designer and create a blank report and from there a new data source based on an SQL query.

Obviously doesn’t really help with a shipped report or anything based on an RDD, but it is equally as good as crystal - you create the sql statement, you do a preview within the report designer and get your data back by clicking on the run button - you link back to the finished SSRS report within the E10 client via the url link option in the menu editor and can restrict access to the report, though not the data, using the standard E10 security framework. You can also use SQL/SSRS to schedule the reports to be emailed, saved to a folder etc on a schedule. There is a freeware tool called report synch that will easily transfer any reports from an SSRS test instance to live and vice versa and it is a one button process to change the data source - all you really need to do is create a new E10/SQL database to use for report creation and refresh by copying live to it and you have an offline development environment.

I fully expect flaming comments about direct connections to sql and performance etc but as I say I am directly following the instructions from an official Epicor training guide that has zero caveats about any performance impact - obviously if you write bad SQL, it can kill your db.

As I say this is no good for anything with an E10 RDD.

Document reference info below

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course.ditaval

Number one issue here is security
Going straight to SQL you bypass all of epicors security plus this isn’t an option for SaaS

SAP owns Crystal Reports. I believe Epicor would want to phase them out over time.

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Unless you know the report URL you are going to struggle to access the SSRS report - really depends on your environment and the level of compliance on how much of an issue security is - in terms of making it available via the Epicor menu you have the same menu item security options as any other report. You are in SSRS, not native SQL, so it is read only access.

We are on version 10.0.7.4 and the Epicor created SSRS training material available via education courses on our version actively advocates this approach with no caveats.

This thread made a request that Epicor are unlikely to fulfil, this is a workaround, that may not suit the majority of folks for all sorts of reasons, including security, but that Epicor themselves have previously formally promoted via inclusion in the formal training materials.

Are these tips only for 10.2.300? I’m on 10.2.200.9 in DT and got excited for a minute, but I don’t see the download options?

Same here, I didn’t notice any difference in VS last time I tried it a report. (Pretty sure it was within the past 6 months).

Nothing stopping creating a menu Item in Epicor and have the users access it that way.

Admittedly it just opens up your browser and you can see the URL there, but as mentioned before the data is read only. So the user has to have access to the menu item first before they can see the URL.