For the Scrum for Team System project I have been focusing on the reports; I came across an issue which was due to the way the Reporting Services 2008 "automatic upgrade" feature upgraded our reports.
The Scrum for Team System template contains over 20 reports all written for Reporting Services 2005. This was done because Team Foundation Server 2008 only worked on SQL Server 2005 and Reporting Services 2005. Then in August of 2008 Team Foundation Server 2008 Services Pack 1 was released which added support for the Team Foundation Server 2008 is to run on SQL Server 2008 platform.
With Reporting Services 2008 there is a new reporting definition language schema. However reporting services does have backward compatibility method as describe below:
The report server will validate report definition file against the included reference to the RDL namespace which specifies the version of the report definition schema that is used.
The report is automatically upgraded the first time it is viewed, but the stored report definition file remains unchanged.
So if you edit the report from the server it will still remain in old schema and not the new schema.
To get automatically upgraded report definition you will open the report in one of the authoring tools: Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Microsoft Report Builder 2.0.
So I did some testing to see how the 2005 reports would look after the reporting services 2008 processing. I found that 2 reports didn’t render the same as did on reporting services 2005. The 2 reports had a common layout they were using a reporting services sleazy hack: The Green-Bar Matrix. The cell which controls the background colour was a lot more visible than the original as well as the text. So I rewrote the reports and were released them with version 2.2.
Then one of our template users reported that one of the other reports stopped working. The report started to give the following error:
The processing of Parent for the tablix ‘table1’ cannot be performed. The comparison failed. Please check the data type returned by the Parent.
I was able to trace the error to an option in one of the report define groups: Recursive parent, which can found under advanced; removing the option made the report worked again. I haven’t been able trace why the error happens it only seems when our data came back in a certain way which I am currently looking into.