New InfoPath features
(Standard and Enterprise Edition only)
Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7 provides a new statement dedicated to handle InfoPath form libraries:
This new statement lets you select data from any field within your InfoPath form:
The complete form schema is displayed. Enesys RS Data Extension properly handles one to many relations. Indeed, when selecting repeated fields, multiple items per InfoPath Form will be returned.
This new feature opens up interesting analytical possibilities over your InfoPath Form Libraries. The following screen shot show a report that displays Invoiced Items broke down by companies.
With Enesys RS Data Extension version 3.7 full InfoPath support you can analyze your InfoPath data the way your want.
Item Versions Performances
In combination with Reporting Services installed in SharePoint integration mode, Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7 will provide a 5 to 10 times performance improvement for retrieving item versions.
If you have used Enesys RS Data Extension for building reports that deal with item versions, you certainly know that this is a time consuming process. The main reason being the limitation of the SharePoint Web Services API in that specific area.
To somewhat mitigate this problem, Enesys RS Data Extension 3.5 made it possible to limit version retrieval to specific fields. Before version 3.5, it was an all or nothing option: version information would be retrieved for any selected field. This approach provided a performance boost for scenarios like when you just need to retrieve “comments” history.
Version 3.7, goes a step further and takes advantage of the SharePoint Object Model to provide dramatically improved performance.
Claims Based sites support and Improved Authentication features
With ERSDE 3.7, we have completely revisited the authentication mechanism to provide all possible options whether you are using a SharePoint integrated or Standalone setup.
Here is a summary of the new features you can expect in this area:
- Kerberos is not necessary anymore when using Windows Integrated Security in SharePoint Integration Mode.
- Support for passing credential of the SharePoint user running the report in a FBA Site when Reporting Services is configured in SharePoint integration mode.
- Support for Claims Based Sites (Forms or Windows authentication) using Windows Integrated Security (Stored Credentials was already supported in version 3.6)
In order to provide support for Claims based sites along with all the authentication features currently available, Enesys RS Data Extension provides a second data sources that takes advantage of SharePoint token support available in Reporting Services 2008 R2.
The following screen shot shows both data source types available when configuring a data source definition at the server level in SharePoint integration mode. Enesys SharePoint Token Data Extension 2008 is the newer data source available as part of Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7
In most cases, you will use the regular data source. However, when using Reporting Services 2008R2 in SharePoint Integration Mode for reports using Integrated Security credentials (said another way: the current SharePoint user running the report), you will use the newer (Token based) data source. You can freely switch from one data source type to the other when needed.
Note that only one type of data source is available within Business Intelligence Development Studio: the obvious reason is that it doesn’t make sense to get the token from the current SharePoint user when previewing a report from a client application – you are not logged in as a SharePoint user.
Things can easily be overwhelming when dealing with the various Reporting Services versions, the various SharePoint authentication schemes and the credentials being used for running reports. To make it easier, the following table summarizes the type of data source you should use depending on your Reporting Services version, the authentication mode of your site (web app) and the approach for authenticating: Stored Credentials or Integrated Security (or the current SharePoint user):
| Integrated Security / SP User | Stored Credentials | |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting Services 2005/2008 | ||
| SharePoint Integrated Mode | ||
| Classic Windows (SP2007/SP2010) | Regular (Kerberos not needed) | Regular |
| Classic Forms (SP2007) | Not Supported | Regular |
| Claims Windows (SP2010) | Not Supported | Regular |
| Claims Forms (SP2010) | Not Supported | Regular |
| Standalone Mode | ||
| Classic Windows (SP2007/SP2010) | Regular (Kerberos needed) | Regular |
| Classic Forms (SP2007) | - | Regular |
| Claims Windows (SP2010) | Regular (Kerberos Needed) | Regular |
| Claims Forms (SP2010) | - | Regular |
| Reporting Services 2008R2 | ||
| SharePoint Integrated Mode | ||
| Classic Windows (SP2007/SP2010) | Regular/Token (Kerberos not needed) | Regular |
| Classic Forms (SP2007) | Token | Regular |
| Claims Windows (SP2010) | Token (Kerberos not needed) | Regular |
| Claims Forms (SP2010) | Token | Regular |
| Standalone Mode | ||
| Classic Windows (SP2007/SP2010) | Regular (Kerberos needed) | Regular |
| Classic Forms (SP2007) | - | Regular |
| Claims Windows (SP2010) | Regular (Kerberos needed) | Regular |
| Claims Forms (SP2010) | - | Regular |
Notes:
- With Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7, Kerberos is not needed anymore when running reports using Integrated Security with Reporting Services configured in SharePoint Integration mode (as long as you are not disabling object model). Note that it is still necessary with Reporting Services configured in Standalone mode for passing Windows Integrated Credentials in a multi-server environment: this is not a limitation of Enesys RS Data Extension but the way it works in Windows environment.
- The new data source type (Token) is only being used for accessing Claims Based Sites (and also Classic 2007 FBA sites) in SharePoint Integration mode. Reporting Services 2008 R2 is required in that case.
- ”-” (dash sign), means it’s not supported because it doesn’t make sense. In standalone mode, a report is hosted by Reporting Services report manager and run through its own web interface whereas in SharePoint integration mode, a report is necessarily run by a SharePoint user.
- Not Supported, means that even though that would make sense to implement this approach, Reporting Services 2005/2008 limitations make it impossible to implement.
Improved User Interface
Various aspects of Enesys RS Data Extension user interface has been improved in order to provide a better user experience. Even though we have brought major improvements, you will feel at home with this new version.
Statements
A toolbar is now available in the statement panel:
- In previous versions, only drag and drop was available for moving statements. By experience, it was not always easy to move the statement at the desired location using this approach. The up and down buttons makes it easy to move statements.
- The green arrow indicating the statement used as the ResultSet (see the documentation for the concept of ResultSet within a query) is more appropriate than having the statement name in bold like it was the case in previous versions. This could make think that the statement was selected which was not necessarily the case.
- The New button doesn’t really add any important feature. However, when clicked, it will open a window displaying the various available statements including some description that explain their purposes:
Filters and Order By
In this area we made more significant changes. However, those changes bring better usability without additional learning curve.
There are several ways for filtering data the way you want. The most obvious approach is certainly to filter using a SqlQuery statement. In many cases however, it may be better to filter data at the list level whenever possible. Many customers do not realize this is possible because our user interface doesn’t make it clear at first sight.
Let’s take the query for a report that displays monthly posts between two dates from a SharePoint discussion list.
Previous Versions
Here is what you have in version 3.6 and earlier:
From our requirement, we need to filter posts between two dates. As said earlier, it may not be obvious at first sight what are our options for filtering. If you are used to our SqlQuery statement, you may end up following this path by adding a new statement and filtering using SQL syntax.
In fact if you look more attentively, you can see a tab “Columns/Filtering/Sorting”:
By selecting this “tab”, you will access to filtering options as shown in the following screen shot:
Version 3.7
In version 3.7 we have decided to bring the filtering and sorting options on the main screen without having to select a specific “tab”. Here is what you get for the same query:
Filtering and sorting options are available right under the column list. Besides reminding that it is possible to filter at the list level, it offers a more synthetic view. Because some space was necessary, you will notice that the query in XML format is not displayed by default. You can always display it by clicking on the arrow in the bottom right corner as shown in the following screen shot:
When running the query within the designer, it will automatically open the Results panel. You can however hide the results with a single click when you want to edit your query.
You can also display results more comfortably by hiding the various panels related to the design of the query (statements, columns, filtering, …) by clicking the upper right arrow browsing your data until you want to go back to query design again using a single click:
Overall, those improvements make the overall experience more intuitive.
Filtering Some More
Besides the layout changes, we have also rewritten the filter control in order to provide greater flexibility.
Fields selection
In Enesys RS Data Extension 3.6 and earlier, looking for a specific field for applying a condition is not a particularly great experience as shown in the following screen shot:
And it is even worse if you are looking for some hidden field as some lists may have lots of them.
Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7 uses a drop down approach where you can search a field by entering some text that is part of the name:
This new approach is a tremendous time saver when adding filters.
Indentation, numbering and other goodies
Thanks to a cleaner indentation and the use of numbering, complex filters are much easier to read:
Finally, we are also providing new options that make it possible to rearrange/refactor complex conditions whereas it is often necessary to start from scratch with version 3.6 and earlier. The following screen shot displays some of the available options:
Reference List for RollUpLists statements
In previous versions of Enesys RS Data Extension, the SharePoint list used to build the target query schema was the first list available. In case all the lists you are aggregating are strictly identical, this is not an issue. But in case some of your lists have additional fields that you would like to be part of the target dataset, you will have to ensure that the first list (which is used to build the schema) has all the necessary fields. Depending on your scenario, this may not be practical to achieve.
Enesys RS Data Extension 3.7 now allows you to specify a referenceSite attribute that will contain the URL to the site containing the list used to build the schema. Similarly to the relativeSiteUrl, the referenceSite is a URL relative to the data source URL.