Troubleshooting the Reports Issues in MS CRM 4.0

This article helps you troubleshoot couple of Reporting Services issues that you may encounter while running reports in MS CRM 4.0.The problems may occur even when the MS CRM 4.0 installation was done successfully and no error message was shown for reporting services.

The most common error message that is generally displayed while running the report in MS CRM 4.0 is “The report cannot be displayed”.
This message is a very general one and does not point to any specific problem. There may be various causes for it and one of those is that SQL Server Reporting Services is not running on the server where SQL is installed.

To solve this problem, locate the service in Service Manager and check its status and startup type in the Properties.
If the status is ‘Stopped’, first make the startup type of the service as ‘Automatic’; this will ensure auto-start of the service whenever required, and then start the service.

If you are not able to start the SQL Server Reporting Services and you get Error 1503: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion, verify that multiple application pools with similar names do not exist for Reports to run.

To do away with this problem, perform the following steps:
Make sure that you are logged in to the system with administrative rights.

1. Go to IIS Manager.( Open the Run window and type ‘inetmgr’)

2. Navigate to Websites->Default Web Sites and then locate the ‘Reports’ and ‘Report Server’ virtual directory.

3. Check the Properties of each virtual directory and make note of the name of the Application Pool specified.

4. Now, navigate to ‘Application Pools’ and check if there is any other application pool with similar name apart from the one identified in Step 4.If such application pool exists, delete it.

For example, if the Application Pool name specified in the properties of ‘Reports’ and ‘Reports Server’ Virtual directory is ‘ReportServer’ and there exists application pools ‘ReportsServer’ and ‘ReportServer$SQL’ under Application Pool, then you need to delete ‘ReportServer$SQLExpress’ application pool which is additional and not used by Reports to run.

Apart from the problem specified above many a times we face the problems in deploying the reports to MS CRM 4.0 after developing in Visual Studio.

Even when the report is working fine in Visual Studio (SQL server Business Intelligence Development Studio) 2005, it shows either of the following problems:

1. Prompts for the SQL server username and password every time you wish to deploy it and does not accept any credentials.
2. Shows an error message -Logon failed. Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007052E) is shown in Report Manager while running the report.

To overcome this problem, you need to ensure that the same user credentials are used by the report server in execution account. Perform the following steps to fix the issue:

1. Open the Reporting Services Configuration Manger. You can navigate to Programs->SQL Server 2005->Configuration Tools-> Reporting Services Configuration.

2. Check the ‘Execution Account’ tab in Reporting Services Configuration Manager.

3. If the execution account is set, check the account name and password entered there. It should be same as the user credentials used for logging into the system. Enter the password if it is left blank or reset it, otherwise.