One of the question that regularly comes up is: “He I have created a tabular model in BIDS and deployed it to my test server, now I have changed a measure or a calculated column I deploy those changes and all of my tables are again loaded. I don’t want that ! I just want to deploy some metadata”.
Well actually that is exactly what we do, but the UI is a little deceiving.
When you deploy for the first time and any time after you get the same UI:
But under the covers what we do is:
- Update the metadata of the database on the server
- Send a Process Default command to the database
What happens on the second step at Process Default is that the engine is smart enough to discover what needs to be done to get the database in a fully processed state. If the table already contains data it will not update the database (it will NOT check if there is new data) otherwise it will process the table. At the end of the Process Default command the engine will send a Process Recalc to the database, this will make sure that all the calculated columns / relationships are made into a good state as well.
So in short, if you deploy your model for a second time it won’t reprocess the tables if you haven’t made any structural changed to the model like adding columns. Even though it looks like that in the refresh UI.
Hope this helps.
When using SQL Server Reporting Services as a platform you like your report builders to all work with the same style and report template’s. While browsing the internet i found the answer is pretty simple:
There are two files that maybe of interest to you; StyleTemplates.xml and Report.rdl. If you are familiar with style sheet concept of web development then the function of the StyleTempletes.xml is basically the same. StyleTemplates.xml is responsible for the default font color, size, etc… of the report. This file is used when you are selecting the style on the “Choose the Table Style” window of the report wizard. You are able to create several different styles within this one file. This makes it convenient especially if you are a consultant and developing reports for your customers, that use different fonts, colors, etc…
The Report.rdl you can setup headers, footers and any standard controls. I’ve setup a report.rdl file that contains my company’s standard report header along with report details such as report run date, run by, etc… One unfortunate downside of this is that you can only have one active default report.rdl file used by the wizard. So if you have modified the report.rdl file with you a standard configuration, but need to create many reports with a different configuration utilizing the report wizard, it gets a little tricky. First of all, you need to determine if taking the time to create multiple report.rdl templates is worthwhile. If so, the only way I know of right now to utilize more than one report.rdl file for the report wizard is to create several of them and manually rename the files when you need a different configuration.
These files are typically located at:
- Typically located at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\Business Intelligence Wizards\Reports\Styles\en\StyleTemplates.xml
- Typically located at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject\Report.rdl
So all you have to do install your newly designed template on you report builders develop machine.
Thx to:
http://beacspeak.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!69043F34B6D40843!125.entry
http://blogs.msdn.com/bimusings/archive/2005/12/06/500462.aspx
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/jhermiz/archive/2007/08/14/60283.aspx
