My attic was a disaster, piled high with junk that should have been tossed
out years ago, perhaps even generationsago.As I steeled myself for some house
cleaning, my cell phone rang.
"This is Abigail Pursuit," said the caller. "I'm the CEO of National Manufacturing. I have a mysterious email message that I'd like you to investigate."
"Mysterious, eh? What does it say?"
"It says,'The secret lies with Charlotte'," replied Ms. Pursuit. "That's all?"
I asked."That's mysterious.Who sent it?"
"That's part of the mystery. It was sent from a system account, so we don't know."
"How about Charlotte? What's her story?"
"That's just it," replied Ms. Pursuit. "We don't have an employee named Charlotte."
That was all I needed. I told Ms. Pursuit I was on my way. As I raced to National Manufacturing in my '37 Packard, I thought about the mystery. If Charlotte wasn't an employee, who was she? By the time I pulled into a visitor's parking spot, I had a hunch where I'd find her.
Ms. Pursuit met me at the door. After an exchange of pleasantries, I asked
to browse the corporate network. In moments, my hunch was confirmed. "I see
that your network administrator named your printers after dames: Annabel, Betsy,
and Charlotte. If we go to the printer called Charlotte, I think we'll find
an explanation for this mysterious message."
Unfortunately, instead of finding the answer, we found another mystery. When
we reached the printer, we discovered that it was buried under a drift of printouts.
I grabbed a page from the top of the pile and gave it the once-over. On one
side of the page was National Manufacturing's annual report. On the other side
was a series of letters, characters, and symbols that looked like some type
of code.
"Any idea what this might be?" I asked, pointing to the code.
"It looks like folder paths and filenames," observed Ms. Pursuit."But I don't
know what the names mean."
"Yes, it does look like folder paths and filenames, but the names don't have drive letters or file extensions," I noted."Who's responsible for the annual report?"
"Benjamin Doors is in charge of all our reporting," Ms. Pursuit responded."Lately, he's been fanatical about organizing our business information."
"Business intelligence can yield a wealth of information for a company. It can be a treasure—in your case, a National treasure—but your users shouldn't have to go on a treasure hunt to find what they need."
Soon, we were at Mr. Doors's office asking him about the mysterious code. "Yes,
I put the codes on the back of the annual report. It's a list of folder paths
and filenames for all the reports we've deployed on our Reporting Services report
server. I thought putting this information on the back of the annual report
would help our employees find the business reports they need."
"And the email message,'The secret lies with Charlotte?'" I prompted.
"I sent that message," Doors admitted sheepishly. "I started to compose it to all our users to tell them about the annual report and the key to all our reporting secrets on the Charlotte printer, but I accidentally clicked Send while I was editing the message. It came out kind of cryptic."
"Your desire to make sure everyone has access to business intelligence is a
good idea, pal," I said,"but I think I know a better way."
Using Meaningful Names
I explained to Mr. Doors that SQL Server Reporting Services provides several
tools to help users locate a report stored on the report server. First, Reporting
Services organizes reports into a folder structure. It's important to give each
folder a name that has meaning to your users; it doesn't help to use codes and
cryptic abbreviations in folder names. Folder names can have as many as 260
characters and can contain spaces, characters, and symbols, with some exceptions
(;?:@&=+$,\*<>|"/).
You specify the folder path in which you want the software to save reports that you deploy to the report server from Visual Studio 2005. If one or more of the folders in the path doesn't exist,Visual Studio creates the folder for you. Of course, you can also use Reporting Service's browser-based Report Manager UI to create new folders.
Report names follow the same rules as folder names. Unfortunately, you can't
specify a report name when you deploy the report from Visual Studio. Instead,
Visual Studio 2005 uses the name of the Report Definition Language (RDL) file
as the report name. After you deploy the report, you can use the Report Manager
UI to modify the report's name on the report server. If you use the Report Manager
UI to upload reports, you can specify a report name as part of the upload process.
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