Unforgettable, Utterly unbelievable,

How would you feel if a climax of a highly suspensful film has a comic ending?


Incredulous, anger and more importantly incredibly stupid. After working for three weeks, 6 resources and with a cancelled ticket train, finding out that port number is what has caused the whole problem, I felt like dousing myself with kerosene...


It all started with Manu asking for reports using Reporting Services. He was very adamant that he get it only with Reporting services and he also made a very interesting remark. He said he was planning to make sure all the Program Managers start using it. Whoa...this coming from none other than Asst. Vice President my mind was dizzying to great heights and immediately set the focus upon mastering Reporting Services (if only I knew what was in store for me).

Only the day before I was going through those video tutorials about the reporting services and I knew that the only thing left was to drag and drop the ReportViewer control and give the path of the reportserver where the reports are hosted. phataphat I prepared two reports, deployed to the server, opened http://localhost/reports and then came the deadliest error ever

The selected report is not ready for viewing. The report is still being rendered or a report snapshot is not available. (.rsReportNotReady)

I looked first into the Reporting Services Configuration manager and to my utter shock nothing was configured. Tension was mounting (and it was going to haunt me for another three weeks...) and I called up Azeet. He came in the evening (His Majesty has called him up..hear ...hear...) and we found that the entire reporting services components were deleted. By day end somehow he managed to uninstall and re-install Reporting Services components.

That should have done the trick but sadly it didn't. There are so many events that followed and to cut the REALLY REALLY Long story short, I would summarize it now

1. Reconfiguring the whole Reporting Services Configuration.
2. Disabling the snapshot isolation ( really the whole forums of MSDN couldn't show any other better results except 4 pages and there is a bug in GOOGLE that we found....if you want check out by googling rsReportNotReady and try clicking on the 6 th or 7th or any page after 5th ....)
3. Setting up new databases for the whole damn thing.
4. Various permission levels. This I have gone to the extent of setting up the permissions at DOM object level.
5. Most importantly clicking on the same pages again and again and again for something like 20 times.

On top of this we had following actors coming along : Anil (SSA,8 + exp), Azeet.. the man himself (SSA, 10+), Ramakanth (something more than the other two, 10), Krishna (2+, supposed to have aquainted with REporting Services), and two other guys. For each guy I had to tell them the problem we are facing. Invariably they would ask me to create a fresh report, deploy a fresh report, do all the things that I have done from google search ( what the heck...i just can't tell them I tried ALLL that ....). I also realized something new that this tool was entirely new to them. All to no avail and there was one real good outcome though:

the permission accorded to sa was not being accepted by reporting services.

the only outcome. There was one deadly option that we hadn't tried and that was re-installation of the entire SQL Server. This just was not acceptable to us. This whole episode lasted more than two and a half wretchful weeks. The icing on the cake was the last time we touched the task.

It was August 14th, tuesday and my train was at 7 p.m. Leave was applied and everything was fine. I was following hte same pattern of explaining every guy who had come to debug on how to deploy,delete and what I had done. Around 2 came the bombshell. She wanted me to cancel the ticket and make sure that the job is done and then only I could leave.

For a second I though she would bite back the words and let someone else take over the job left. But man, I was left with something I can never forget in my life, she plainly said cancel your leave, get the job done and then only you can go. Holy crap, it seemed so ridiculous and there was binding fury building within me for the simple fact that me staying a little while longer was in no way going to help us debug the problem as the guy who is supposedly goign to help me was out for lunch and he wasn't due by 4.

With traffic like Bangalore that wsa THE last chance of me catching hte train directly. Time passed by. Looking back that was a blessing in disguise. Earlieer it was decided I had to come back by Friday. But now she gave me the permission to take Friday leave because of the "sacrifice" I made. ( he..he..he.... if only she knew that that night only I packed and set to Hyderabad that same day....boy o boy...that's something...)

Anyways that was the final torment we had. After I came back on monday Ranjit and me had gone back to roots to diagnose the problem and yes my friends that was alll...Ain't no need debugging the rsReportNotReady crap...it was jsut that small mistake of port number and the sudden realisation that it was not http://localhost/reports that was needed for the report viewer control and reportserver was sufficient for enabling the reports as part of website.

As I said at the beginning I would love to have doused myself in a huge tank of kerosene and immolate myself....chee...so freaking stupid......Anyways that was not entirely the solution. But it did set us into thinking in other way of garnering the reports i.e. the hard way...the real hard way of doing them ourselves..

Anyways this is one such issue that plagued me so much that I am not to going to forget it for ages to come. Added to that is that our highly stubborn resolve and i-can't-defend-her-accusations kind of RM. A deadliest match...