“Do you guys have any spare laptops? I put my laptop on the hood of a contractors truck, and he drove away.”
Dell CompleteCare is replacing the laptop without hassle, which is great since it was only a month old.
SSRS – “Jump to Report” in a different project
While working with a report for SSRS 2005, using the Business Intelligence Development Studio, I’ve used the option to “Jump to Report” very often. You can find this by going to the properties of an object (textbox, cell, etc) and the Navigation tab.
The problem I encountered today is that the drop down shown above only displays reports that existing within the current project loaded in Visual Studio. This means if you have a common report used as a drill through, a copy would need to be made inside this project which is obviously a bad idea since multiple copies would need to be updated.
However after a bit of searching I’ve found that you can specify the folder (as it appears on the Report Server) that your sub report exists in, and it will function correctly.
By doing this, you can maintain one copy of your common reports, and just reference them from the folder name.
Note: this won’t work while previewing the master report in Visual Studio unless you have deployed the drill through report to the report server.
As a related aside, I have started organizing my reports all within one Solution in Visual Studio, each under separate projects. Prior to this I had one Solution and one Project for each set of reports, which didn’t scale very well and doesn’t allow for easy referencing. Now, I can get at them all at once:
Inject 3rd party drivers into WDS image
I use Windows Deployment Services (WDS) under Server 2008 to deploy images of Windows 7 x64 over PXE to my desktops and laptops.
I’ve standardized on Dell Latitude and Optiplex computers, so I want these drivers to remain in place after the sysprep, so they don’t need to be added later.
Apparently Server 2008 R2 WDS has the ability to add drivers through the GUI, but I don’t have that luxury yet. Here’s how I’ve gotten these drivers into my image.
The major prerequisite is that you’ll need the Windows AIK tools installed on your server. They can be found here:
Note: you’ll need to have extracted folders of each driver you wish to inject, with the .INF file available. For each model, put all your drivers in it’s own folder under the master one. For example:
- E5420
- Video
- LAN
- Audio
- Chipset
First, open the WDS console, and export the image you want to modify. Right click on the image, and choose Export. Export it to D:\ExportedImages
Then, from an elevated command prompt window, run the following (two separate lines):
"C:\program files\windows aik\tools\petools\copype.cmd" amd64 d:\windowspe-amd64 Imagex /mountrw D:\ExportedImages\Windows7-x64-Field.wim 1 mount
Then copy d:\windowspe-amd64\mount\windows\system32\dism.exe to d:\windowspe-amd64\mount\windows\system32\dism\
Use the following command template to inject the drivers for each system:
dism.exe /image:d:\windowspe-amd64\mount /add-driver /driver:d:\drivers\E6420\ /recurse
When completed, run this command:
imagex /unmount /commit mount
Now re-import the image, either by adding, or replacing the existing one from the right click menu.
SSRS – Get date parameter as end of day
I’ve built a report within SQL Services Reporting Services 2005 (SSRS) that pulls its data based on a date range, chosen through start and end date parameters.
The problem is, if on those parameters I choose April 21st, it’s actually choosing April 21: 00:00. This means if there’s any data that is relevant during the day on April 21st, it wouldn’t be selected.
I needed a way to have my user select April 21st, but have it return values for end of day April 21st. The solution actually proved easier than I originally thought, as I was making it too complicated.
Full credit to Samson Loo who posted about this (outside of SSRS) here: http://justsamson.com/2010/09/19/date-parameters-and-things-to-consider/
My dataset and linked functions all reference the parameter @EndDate, so I didn’t want to go through and change all of that.
Instead, I created a new report parameter called @EndDateEOD, and set its properties to what @EndDate originally was.
I made sure to place this new parameter above my existing @EndDate.
Then I modified @EndDate to make it hidden, and set this as the default value:
=DateAdd("d",1,Parameters!EndDateEOD.Value)
This is adding one day to what the user selects. At first glance this seems like it would produce incorrect information, however in reality, if a user selects April 21st (in reality April 21 00:00:00), then this will use the date April 22 00:00:00 in the dataset, which is what we want.
Searching folder across VPN produces no results
I came across an issue where a user on Windows XP was using Windows Explorer to search within a folder located in a branch office across a VPN. However, their search produced no results, even when it was confirmed there should be.
After some digging I found a Microsoft hotfix that fixed this, but it wasn’t easy to find so hopefully this post may help others find it sooner.
The hotfix is available from this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885843
When you run a search for files or for folders across a slow network link in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or in Microsoft Windows XP, the search result set is empty. This symptom occurs even though the files or the folders in question actually exist. Additionally, you receive the following message: "Search is complete. There are no results to display." For example, you may experience this problem when you search a remote mapped drive over a wide area network (WAN) link.