I don’t know about you guys, but I am really petrified of public speaking. So I always try to read about it and it really gives me some comfort to know that I am not alone. In fact, if your fear of public speaking is between mild anxiety and complete terror, you are said to be well within the normal range. I would not be exaggerating if I said that some studies show that there are people who rate their fear of public speaking as more severe than fear of death. Last year was when I finally decided to embrace my fear and I managed to speak at a local user group event in London and also at SQLBits (trust me, it wasn’t that hard as I thought it would be). And since now is the time everyone makes resolutions, I was trying to take some hint from 50 New Year’s Resolutions for Public Speakers and watching my presentation video from the last SQLBits. Seeing it, I realized I had missed mentioning an important point regarding map reports and hence decided to blog about it before I get too lazy.
People who are familiar with map report development would already be aware of the size issues when dealing with shapefiles (If you are a complete newbie on map reports, I would strongly recommend you to go through my presentation video). Most of the shapefiles are in MBs and since this data is embedded in the report RDLs, the size of the RDL also goes into MBs. The problem as well as the solution are demonstrated below:-
1) Make a simple report from a shapefile by selecting the Basic Map option in the Map Wizard. I haven’t linked the shapefile to a dataset for simplicity purpose.
2) Now you can verify that the shapefile data has been embedded in the report by right clicking on the report in the solution explorer, and selecting the view code option.
You can see that the territory names are there in the rdl code.
3) Now deploy the report to the report server and then, download the rdl to check the size.
You can see that the rdl size is 3.11 MB. The shapefile that I had used for this report was 2.4 MB.
4) Now to solve this issue, we will have to upload the shapefile (.shp and .dbf files) to the report server. For this, navigate to the folder in Report Manager and click on upload. Then browse to the shp and dbf files and click ok.
5) Once this is done, go back to the report in BIDS and click on the map twice to bring the map layers panel on the right. Right click on the polygon layer and select Layer data option.
6) Now change the option from Data Embedded in Report to Link to ESRI Shapefile. Now give the location of the files in your report server (In this case, Blog ReportsCOL_adm1.shp). Note that the location has to start with a slash followed by the folder names within the report manager and then the file name of the shp file.
7) Once this is done, you will not be able to view the results in BIDS. You can view the report code to confirm that the map data is not embedded in the rdl now. Just deploy the report after that and preview it in report manager to ensure that it is working. 8) Now, download the rdl from the report server and you can see that the size has been considerably reduced, from over 3 MB to 12.2 KB.
It would actually be a good practice to store your shapefiles in the report server at the end of your development. This way, the shapefiles can be reused by multiple reports if needed. Also, you would not need to open BIDS in case an updated version of the shapefile becomes available later. This technique can also be used for report images though I see little benefit from it as usually the images are only a few KBs. As for performance, I quickly checked a couple of times and the rendering time was a little less using this technique. Maybe I will do a detailed performance test and post a blog on it later. Till then, adieus amigos!
It had helped us a lot! thanks dude 🙂
Very useful article Jason…Thanks 🙂