Creating an Atom Feed from Vision reports

Vision 6.1 SP4 now supports SSRS 2008 R2. R2 has many new features that include Atom rendering extensions. This means a report can be a data feed. What this really means is that a report can be a data source that can be used by any application that can consume a feed.

For example, Excel 2010 with PowerPivot can consume an Atom Feed. For the most part, anything that can consume XML can also consume an ATOM feed.

I tested this out by going to the ReportManager URL for our SSRS 2008 R2 reporting server that is used by Vision. The default URL for most R2 installations usually looks something like this: http://YOUR_REPORT_SERVER_NAME/Reports_SQL2008R2

Find your Vision report and run the report. You should notice an orange icon in which I have highlighted with a red box around it. This is the export to data feed icon.

See the screen shot below.

When you click the orange icon, you will be prompted to save the atom feed. An improtant note about the screen shot below is if you have Excel 2010 installed from the machine you are exporting the data feed to, you will have an "Open" button to open directly into excel.

I chose to save the Atom file, which you then can open in any text editor to view, or you can view directly in your browser like the screen shot below.

Although it may be hard to detect based on my poor screen shot, you will see a URL listed in the collection XML tag. If you replace the "&" to "&" in the URL, copy and paste it into your browser, you will get an enormous XML data dump of the contents of the report. This is the XML output from the data feed.

From here, you can choose to open the XML or just the .atomsvc file directly in Excel 2010, or in any other data feed consumer and your Vision reports can be a datasource for the Web 2.0 revolution.

Enjoy!!!