Ben Sullins Tech

Quick one here…I was recently setting up a SSRS 2008 dev environment integrated with a MOSS 2007 dev environment and encountered some strange problems with the SSRS 2008 Add-In for SharePoint. Basically every time it would run and state the installation was “interrupted” and nothing was changed. To my frustration nothing appeared to be wrong with the MOSS or SSRS setups however I did notice an error in the event viewer related to access to the SQL Server database. It turns out that wasn’t the problem either. There seems to be an issue with the rsSharePoint[_x64].msi installer as mentioned in Prash’s blog here (http://blogs.msdn.com/prash/…)

To overcome this hurdle you must follow the following steps:

1. Open a command prompt with “Run as Administrator…”
2. Run rsSharePoint.msi SKIPCA=1.
3. Locate rsCustomAction.exe file on the file system. This file is copied to your computer by rsSharePoint.msi and is generally located in the C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Temp directory.
4. Run rsCustomAction.exe /i

You will see lots of messages similar to those below in the command window but it will eventually finish and you’re setup of the SSRS 2008 Add-In for your MOSS 2007 environment will be complete.

Hope this helps!

In SSIS 2005 a single config source (XML or SQL Server) with many connection strings could be used to setup the connections for multiple packages even if those packages did not contain all of the connections specified in the config source. In this scenario the native package configurations would read the source and attempt to apply connection strings for all those specified in the source. In cases where the connection did not exist in the SSIS package a warning would be reported however, these warnings could be ignored by setting the ‘SupressConfigurationWarnings’ property to ‘True’ within the package. This configuration strategy worked well for me in past experience since I would only have to manage the connection strings for almost all packages within a single config location. This method however, does not work in SSIS 2008

Below is the solution I decided on however I am not totally satisfied with it. If you are also running into this issue and have something to share please comment below. Thanks!

Variable Approach
1. Inside the package there is a variable for every connection manager that will contain it’s connection string
2. The value for these variables will be derived from a package configuration pulling from a SQL Server source
3. Connection managers all are then set by an expression assigning the value of the variable to their connection string property

Benefits
1. A warning (versus error) is thrown when there is a variable in the database not found in the package that can be ignored by updating the ‘SupressConfigurationWarnings’ property to true. This is also set by another configuration.
2. A single place to manage all connection strings for all SSIS packages

Cons
1. Extra steps are involved when adding new connection managers to a package

Below are the results from my tests using the same strategy in SSIS 2005 and SSIS 2008.

2005 Output

Warning: 0×8001F02F at Package: Cannot resolve a package path to an object in the package “.Connections[Conn2].ConnectionString”. Verify that the package path is valid.
SSIS package “Package.dtsx” starting.
SSIS package “Package.dtsx” finished: Success.

2008 Output

Error at Package: The connection “Conn2″ is not found. This error is thrown by the Connections collection when the specific connection element is not found.”