Just to be clear, we tried SSRS 2008 before but apparently SSRS 2008 has a problem with dynamically updating parameters where parameters are depending on another parameter. What that means is that let’s say you want your report to dynamically fill in two text boxes – a start date and an end date. You want to make this easy for your users so you make a seperate parameter box that has a drop down with options like “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Last Month”. Upon picking the option, there is a switch() function in the other two text boxes that will change the start and end date to correspond correctly with what was picked in the first box. This worked great in SSRS 2005, however in SSRS 2008 there appears to be a bug where only the first parameter after the parent parameter would change (in my example – only the start date would update but not the end date). It would actually dynamically update the end date the first time you picked a date range (i.e. – “yesterday”, but if you then changed the parent parameter to say “Today”, the start date would change however the end date would stay the same. There is no way to update the end date unless you go out of the report and come back in. For the reason, we had to revert back to SSRS 2005 (there are some posts on the Microsoft Technet forums so I’m betting this will be fixed in a future fix from Microsoft).

Anyways, by setting all this up I managed to find all the wonderful little ‘tweaks’ you have to do to get this to work. Let’s start with IIS 7 and the installation of SSRS 2005. By default, the SQL Server installer will look for IIS to be installed before it will allow you the option of choosing to install SSRS. Unfortunately it doesn’t detect IIS 7 as being an IIS installation by default, so there are some teaks to get this to work. Go into your IIS configuration by going to the Server Manager application and adding roles to your IIS installation. You will need to make sure the following IIS roles are added in order for the SQL Server install to detect IIS 7 as an IIS server (mainly this is just a hack to put all the IIS 6 features back into IIS 7 btw).

- Web Server
– Common HTTP Features
— Default Docuemnt
— Directory Browsing
— HTTP Errors
— HTTP Redirection
– Application Development
— ASP.NET
— ISAPI Extensions
— ISAPI Filters
– Security
— Windows Authorization
- Management Tools
– IIS 6 Management Compatibility
— IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
— IIS Metabase Compatibility

Once all these features are installed, you should be able to install SSRS 2005 via the SQL Server installation.

The next tweak you will have to do is changing the application pool that SSRS 2005 runs under. After you install SSRS 2005 and get it configured using the Reporting Service Configuration Manager, go into the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager for IIS 7. Go to the Reports directory and click “Basic Settings…” on the far right. On the “Edit Application” box that pops up, change the Application pool to “Classic .NET AppPool”, which will allow the application to send application data “the way it wants to” (a.k.a. IIS 6).

One last tweak you may want to do is for the email. On Windows Server 2003, the server had the ability to look up the domain name based on an email alias. By default, when a user creates a subscription it will set the “To” field of the email to their domain user name. On Windows Server 2003 the server could look this up in Active Directory and get the domain that the user belonged to in order to send them a proper email. In Windows Server 2008 however, for security reasons Microsoft disabled this ability – now the email is attempted to be sent the MyUser as opoosed to MyUser@MyDomain.com, and of course without the domain name the email will fail to send. Luckily there is a work around for this, and if you open up the rsreportserver config file (found in the “ReportServer” directory of your report server installation) you can find a field for . Simply add your domain name into the value (i.e. MyDomain.com) and then stop and start the reporting server in order to enable this change. Optionally if for some reason you just want to disable the automatic usage of the domain user account name in reporting services, there is a field right about DefaultHostName called SendEmailToUserAlias, and you can just set that to false and restart the report server to allow users to enter in whatever email address they want. You can also see more information on this Microsoft KB Article here

Anyways – hopefully this will help someone get this all working without having to spend the time to figure this stuff out like I did.