Post date: Jul 23, 2020 5:32:59 AM
The SSRS repository is a feature in the products formerly known as Keystyle, now known as HR Portal, Financial Controls, and Field Management. This feature allows customers to expose SSRS dashboards and reports wrapped in web pages, improving accessibility and ease of use for these reports.
Significantly, Vista uses a function known as "Workcenters" to also embed SSRS dashboards and reports, but within the Vista client itself instead. In order for these SSRS dashboards and reports to work with VRL, where the client workstation is in a different Windows AD domain than the Vista server in our cloud, we need to leverage a special SSRS security extension, known as "custom security". As such, any time we install VRL in a customer's environment, we need to turn on custom security.
Unfortunately, as of the writing of this article, HFF's SSRS Repository is not compatible with Custom Security.
As such, customers who request VRL, or who were transformed into the cloud after December 2019 when VRL became the default method of experiencing cloud-hosted Vista, will find that when VRL is installed, their previous SSRS Repository in HFF will no longer function. We realize that this is not ideal for a number of customer workflows, so we have undertaken a number of steps to address this, including enhancing HFF to support custom security. However, as this is a meaningful development effort, it may be some time until this process is complete.
In the meantime, there are a number of options that are available to customers who would like to use VRL:
Disable Custom Security in SSRS
This will mean that the Vista rich client will NOT have the ability to display SSRS dashboards or to use Workcenters. If you do not use SSRS dashboards or Workcenters in Vista itself, this is a viable option as it will allow the HFF SSRS repository to work as is.
Forgo the use of SSRS dashboards
You would switch to other solutions such as Viewpoint Analytics, PowerBI, Prophix, etc.
Forgo the use of HFF's repository
In this case, you would redirect usage of these dashboards to take place within the Vista rich client itself, rather than the HFF web site
Request a second SSRS Instance be installed
This is a more complicated set of steps that requires enhancements to your cloud infrastructure at Viewpoint.
A cloud engineering ticket is requested to have a second SSRS instance installed, pointing to the Vista DB, with custom security left OFF, and HFF is pointed to that new SSRS instance
The original SSRS instance still has custom security ON, allowing VRL to continue to function
This option may take a week or so to execute, so please ask for this as soon as you have the need
tl;dr: There are incompatibilities between HFF's SSRS repository and the "Custom Security" extension to SSRS required by VRL. After VRL is installed, the SSRS Repository in HFF (Keystyle) will break. Until Viewpoint has upgraded HFF to support Custom Security, you should choose one of the four options above to move forward.