Managing Reports

The reports in Team System are located in two places: the SQL Server reporting portal and within Team Explorer. You can access the reports in the SQL Server reporting portal by expanding your Team Project within Team Explorer, right-click ing on the Reports node, and selecting Show Report Site. You can alternatively access your Team System project reports by typing in the following in your Web browser: http://localhost/Reports/ .

There are several ways you can share a report using Windows SharePoint Services. You can use the SQL Reporting Services Web Parts or the page viewer, which allows redirection based on a URL. To make any modifications to the team portal, you need Microsoft FrontPage. You can also use the Web Part Manager to drag the appropriate parts and specify the report URL. Here are the steps to add a report to the team portal using the Page Viewer Web Part:

Click Modify Shared Page ⇨ Design This Page.
Click Modify Shared Page ⇨ Add Web Part. You are then presented with the following options: Browse, Search and Import.
Select Browse and then select the Page Viewer Web Part.
You can then drag the part to the left portion of the screen.
Click the down-arrow at the corner of the Web part and select Modify Shared Web Part.
In the Link section on the right, enter /Reports/"> http://< servername >/Reports/ .
Click OK.

You can run the reports by double-clicking on them in Team Explorer. Reports can also be executed by clicking on the links on the SQL Server Reporting Services Web site. As easily, you can delete a report on Team Explorer by selecting Delete. On the reporting site, your reports can be deleted by clicking on the Show Detail option, checking off the report you want to delete and clicking on the Delete option.

Important

Note that deleting a report in this way will remove it from your Team Project permanently, but will not affect the process template you used to instantiate the project.

Unfortunately, you cannot really export reports from Team Explorer. All you can do is print from the interface by clicking on the printer icon. On the reporting site, you can export in a variety of formats including the following:

XML file with report data
Comma delimited (CSV)
TIFF file
Acrobat (PDF) file
Web archive
Excel

The Excel and PDF formats are very handy for creating redistributable versions of the reports.

Troubleshooting the Data Warehouse

One of the common issues that come up when you first generate a Team Project is that you try to generate a report and nothing comes up, or you'll get an error message such as " An error has occurred during report processing.(rsProcessingAborted) " or " rsErrorExecutingCommand ." First, consider that your project initially doesn't have any data in it; therefore, you won't see much in the reports . Second, if you do have data in your project (for example, you have added work items), the warehouse refresh occurs only once an hour .

Another common problem when you first set up a Team Project is that you may see a little red x next to the Reports node. This means that you didn't set the appropriate permissions on the reporting site. Please follow the instructions in Chapter 4 for details on how to set up privileges using the Report Manager.

Important

MSDN has great information on troubleshooting the data warehouse ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms244674.aspx ) and troubleshooting SQL Server Reporting Services ( http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms244677.aspx ).

Administering and Refreshing the Warehouse

Typically, the data warehouse refreshes data every hour. What happens is that the data are aggregated from the operational stores to the fact tables. Once that operation has occurred, then the cube is refreshed. There may be circumstances where the stakeholders in the project may need the report information to be refreshed more frequently.

Important

If you use SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, optimizations have been made to the product for parallel processing in increments . Whenever you are modifying the refresh frequency, be mindful of the overhead and the impact on your operations especially if you are planning to refresh more frequently.

The default refresh rate is once per hour. To change the refresh rate, you must have administrative privileges on the data tier . You can change the setting by using the WarehouseController Team Foundation Server Web service. Here are the specific steps:

Launch Internet Explorer (or your browser of choice) and type in the following link:

http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx
Go to the ControllerService page and click the ChangeSetting link.
Type in RunIntervalSeconds in the settingsID input field.
Type in the number of seconds between refreshes in the newValue input field. For example, an hour is 3600 seconds (60 minutes 60 seconds). To set the interval to half an hour, write in 1800 (30 minutes 60 seconds).
Click the Invoke button.

The Web service in question appears as shown in Figure 16-14.

image from book
Figure 16-14

Once you have set up the new refresh rate, you can verify it using the GetWarehouseStatus method. There are three default statuses that can come up: Idle, RunningAdapters, or ProcessingOlap. Once the data warehouse has been processed , the status will return to Idle.

SetupWarehouse

There may be instances where you will need to completely rebuild the data warehouse. The Team Foundation Server Warehouse Setup Tool ( SetupWarehouse) allows you to fix up either the relational database or the OLAP cube. You can access the tool at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Tools .

You can rebuild the relational database using this command:

SetupWarehouse -rebuild -mturl MidTierURL -s ServerName -d TFSWarehouse-c wareHouseSchema.xml -a TFSServiceAccount -ra TFSReportAccount -edt TeamBuildDataBase

You can also rebuild the OLAP cube using the following command:

SetupWarehouse -o -s YourDataTierServer -d TFSWarehouse -c warehouseSchema.xml -a TFSServiceAccount -ra TFSReportAccount

A list of all the available options is available online at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms400783.aspx . You can also get a list of commands by typing the following in the command prompt: