Click through to CRM records from SSRS custom report for Microsfot Dynamics CRM 4. Linking information on SQL Reporting Services custom CRM reports to Dynamics CRM 4 records and opening them up from within the report.

If you are writing a custom report – SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4, you might want to add the functionality (sql expression) to click through to a record. This can be applied to some or all information shown on the report, so that if you click on the information text box, you open up the corresponding CRM record in a new window such as: click on sub-account in the sub-accounts list to open this sub-account CRM record, or the same for contact, opportunities and so on.

To do this, right click on the text box in where you will be putting the expression and the value to be clicked on, and click on Texbox properties. On there click on Actions on the left, select last option “Go to URL” and in the expression box type the following query expression

=IIF(IsNothing(Parameters!CRM_URL.Value),system.dbnull.value,Parameters!CRM_URL.Value & "?ID={"&Fields!Accountid.Value.ToString()&"}&OTC=1")
/*Replace "&Fields!Accountid" with the ID of the corresponding record */
/*you want to be open, so contactid, opportunityid or any other custom entity id field*/
/*Also replace OTC value above with the Entity Object type Code (OTC) value*/

You can get any entities OTC value from the “EntityView” view or for the full list of all system entities type codes, read this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb887791.aspx. Obviously you will need to get the OTC value for your custom entities from the “EntityView” view from your Dynamics CRM database. You can use a query similar to the following:

select entitytypecode from entityview where entityname = 'account'

This sql expression can work with any entity either system (cusomisable) or custom entity.

SQL Server Reporting Services Error cannot decrypt the symmetric encryption key & website declined to show this web page

One of our “big and important” clients has approached us with an issue with their system. The problem is that reports are not accessible from the .NET application and CRM that we have built for them. If you try to open reports from these, you get the error in Internet Explorer saying “Website declined to show this webpage. The website requires you to login”. We were getting this error with everything related to reporting services. So when logged on the reports server machine, those urls:  http://localhost/reports , http://localhost/reportserver , http://localhost/reportsmanager all come back with this error or with the error 403 forbidden “Error 403 Forbidden access”.

To rectify this issue, I went through all the usual possible routes such as authentication on IIS, reports server and reports website on IIS. Made sure that all the application and system users have the right access to the reports server. Checked the application pool for the reports server, all these looked find with nothing that has been unchanged. I have also tried to check the reports server configuration manager. Went through all the usual steps to check that it is running and configured properly and again these were all fine with the nice green tick next to each step of the reports server configuration manager. I have also checked services running on the server and the server even viewer. All windows services and SQL reporting server services were running correctly and can be restarted with no issue.

 Then, a colleague of mine, tried to open reports from the management studio, and that was it. The error we got in the management studio was much more descriptive and helpful. The SSRS reports server management studio error said:

The report server cannot decrypt the symmetric key used to access sensitive or encrypted data in a report server database. You must either restore a backup key or delete all encrypted content. Report server disabled”

The problem here is because that the Reporting Services encryption key has been invalidated, in other words corrupted. This encryption key is stopping reporting services from returning any reports or even displaying the reports manager, etc..

To fix this issue, and after some research, there were two solutions to solve this issue (again solutions found by my colleague, not me!):

Solution1: In SSRS 2005, there is the encryption section on the left hand side.  We need to go to this section and restore the encryption key using a backup encryption key. The encryption key should probably (and hopefully) have been backed up during the setup of the Reporting Services. This encryption key should be regularly backed up and stored in a safe location along with the encryption key password. If you got this backup encryption key, and to solve this error, we need to restore it from the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, encryption section.

If you you don’t have backup of it, then you will have to go for the other longer and more annoying option which is:

Solution2You have to delete the encrypted content. This will remove the connection strings from all the reporting services data sources. Hence, in this case and after removing the encryption and generating a new one, you need to reset the data sources in Report Manager. Datasources could be shared (linked) or could be a separate data source for each report. You will need and update all these data sources after you removed the encryption.

 

Luckily! Our good client had the backup of the encryption key, so we only needed to do solution one (Thank God for that!). Well, to be fair, they searched on the server and found a file with extension ” *.snk “ on their server and it was the encryption key backup.

All SSRS encryption keys have file extension .snk.

That’s it.. problem solved. Thanks again to my colleagues work on these solutions.

 

Error with Report Server

We have been recently approached by a client who had a problem with their report server. If you try to access reports from the reports manager, reports run fine and you can view any report fully and in the right format. The problem arrises when a .NET application tries to open these reports, it just opens a new internet explorer window and uses a url to show the report. This was working fine until the client has probably made some changes to their report server. Since then, reports are not displaying in Internet explorer.

To cut a long story short, we eliminated all authentication issues by checking that security and access to all reports is properly configured and the right users has the right to run these reports. We also eliminated problems between SQL Server and the report server, as reports can run smoothly from the reports manager.

We finally came with the concolusion that the error must be related to Internet Explorer not able to render the report properly. We looked through IIS but could not find anything that looks wrong or not the way it should. I have then checked the security setting of Internet explorer (Tool –> Internet Options –> Advanced) and this all seemed fine but I ticked the box that says display all scripting errors. We also did something which I am not sure if it made any difference, which is that we added the server to the trusted sites in Internet Explorer. Then when we tried to open the report again, this time we started to get scripting errors (although they were not showing in the status bar before for some reason). Scripting error dialogs start to show and we finally started to understand what is happening. We got errors such as: “RS Controller is undefined”, “RSControl object reference not set to an object”. We quickly googled this error and we found an easy and simple solution for this (can’t find the original solution at the moment). The solution is to go to the report server itself, open IIS, right click on your reports server (usually under default website), go to directory –>configuration –> search for axd and double click to open its properties. On there uncheck the filter option (can’t remember the option on top of my head and I don’t have access to any IIS 6.0 at the moment to get the exact option wording). Finally click ok.

This has simply solved the problem, and we managed to get all reports back working from the browser and the .NET applicaiton now opens these reports externally with no issues at all.

I have created this post few days after the resolution, and I don’t have access to the client’s servers at the moment so if you have a similar problem and the post doesn’t answer your questions, please feel free to comment here and I promise I will get back to you as soon as I can with more details and may be a screenshot!

All the best.