Getting Started with SSRS - Part 3 - Designing a report using Report Designer

Getting Started with SSRS - Part 3 - Designing a report using Report Designer

Introduction
This article would cover how to design a report using the Report Designer. In our previous article, we saw the option on designing a report using the Report Wizard with just the configurations used to design and develop the report with some simple steps. However, in this article we will design every component on our own with the help of the Report Designer available with the SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio templates. Let us see the step-by-step process on how to design the report with the Report Designer.
Steps
The first step towards our task is to open Business Intelligence Studio. To open it, we would need to navigate through Programs >> Microsoft SQL Server Denali / Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as per the installed version and select Business Intelligence Development Studio as shown in the screen below.

This will open Visual Studio. It is the Business Intelligence Development Studio for SQL Server as shown in the screen below.

Now select File >> New >> Project to create a new project. We can directly use the shortcut Control + Shift + N to open a new project as shown in the screen below.

Once we have selected the New Project, a list of templates will be available as shown in the screen below.

Select Report Server Project template from the list of templates available and provide a valid name for the project as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on OK will create a project and open the project in the SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio as shown in the screen below.

Initially, there are no files created and only two folders are available. The next step is manually adding a report to the project. To add the report, click on the Reports folder in the solution explorer and select ADD >> New Item as shown in the screen below. Selecting Add New Report will go directly to the Report Wizard that we have already covered in the previous article.

Now, a window will be displayed with a list of available items that can be added to the project as shown in the screen below. Select Report from the list, provide a valid name and click on Add button to add a report to the project.

This will add the report to the project and open the Report Designer to allow designing the report as per the requirement as shown in the screen below.

Next step is to go to the Tool Box. Then drag and drop a table to design the report as shown in the screen below. Now we need to configure the data set first in order to design our report table.

To do the configuration we would first need to create a data source. This can be achieved by clicking on the New button. It will open a window where we would need to supply the details of the connection string as shown in the screen below. Configure it based on the database from which the data for the report needs to be collected.

Clicking on OK will go back to the old window with the data source available for pulling the data for the report. Now click on the Query Designer button to build the query required to pull the data as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Query Designer will open a new window as shown in screen below. Write the query required to fetch the data. In this example, we are going to use the Authors table from the Pubs database. Once we write our query, click on the Execute button to get the complete details of the data for our reference to finalize the query. We can perform as many executes as required to get a final data as per the business requirement as shown in the screen below. Once we are done, click on OK to close this window and navigate back to the wizard.

Clicking on OK button will go back to the previous window and we can see the selected query available in the list as shown in the screen below.

Click on the OK button to complete the process. With this, we can see the table created in the designer view as shown in the screen below. We can customize the table as per our requirement.

Now we need to customize the report by dragging the outline of the table to the required length and width as shown in the screen below.

Next, we need to go to the data source we have created and select which columns should appear in which part of the report. To do this, first select the cell and click at the right side corner of the cell to get the list of columns as shown in the screen below:

Select the columns based on the requirement and edit the headers to the required customized format as shown in the screen below.

Click on the Preview tab to view the report’s preview as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see the report output in the preview mode. We can build and execute the project if we are satisfied with the report output. Else, we can go ahead and change the report design based on the business requirement. Since we have not used any inbuilt wizard, we need to manually do all the customization (Selecting Styles formats etc.). Now we have made some customization as shown in the screen below.

Press F5 or hit the Play button from the tool bar to build and execute the project to get the report output. However, we will get an error message that the start-up report project is not specified as shown in the screen below.

Go to the properties of the project and select the report as shown in the screen below. Since we have not used any wizard to build the report generation, these steps needs to be performed manually.

Once again, press F5 or Play button from the tool bar to build and execute the project. This will present the result as shown in the screen below.

Summary
Thus, in this article we have seen how to design and generate report from scratch without using the Report Wizard with the help of SQL Server Business Intelligence Studio.

 original Post by

Nov 12 2011 12:00AM by Karthikeyan Anbarasan   

 

Getting Started with SSRS - Part 2 - Designing a report using Report Wizard

Getting Started with SSRS - Part 2 - Designing a report using Report Wizard

 

Introduction
This article frames a guideline on how to make the use of the Report Wizard and create a simple report using the Business Intelligence Studio. A Report Wizard is the simplest form for creating a readymade report by simply selecting the data that should be displayed and by selecting the inbuilt templates available as per the requirement. Let us now see how to create the reports using the Report Wizard Template of the Business Intelligence Studio.
Steps
The first step towards our task is to open Business Intelligence Studio. To open it, navigate to Programs >> Microsoft SQL Server Denali / Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as per the installed version and then select Business Intelligence Development Studio as shown in the screen below.

This will open Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a Business Intelligence Development Studio for SQL Server and looks as shown in the screen below.

Next, select File >> New >> Project to create a new project. We can even use the shortcut Control + Shift + N directly as shown in the screen below.

Once a new project is selected, a list of templates will be available as shown in the screen below.

As we are in Business Intelligence Studio, the list of template will not have the normal templates (C#, VB.Net, Office etc).
Now the next step is to create a report using the Report Wizard. To do this, select the Report Server Project Wizard as shown in the screen below.

Once we select the Report Wizard and provide a valid name to the project as shown in the screen above, click on OK to create the project. Once the project is created, we can see a screen as shown below.

This is the start-up screen. To stave off the start up screen in the future, we can select the option “Don’t show this page again”. Once we are done with the above changes, click on the Next button to proceed further.
Now we can see a new window requesting for the data source input details. In this input request, we can either configure a shared data source or create a new data source as per the requirement. In our example, we will create a new data source as shown in the screen below.

Next, click on the Edit button and edit the connection string to connect to the database from which the data has to be retrieved to present in the reports. On clicking Edit button a window will open as shown in the screen below.

Once we have provided the above details (It may change as per your system database), click on Test Connection to test if the connection is successful. Once the connection is successful, click on OK and we can see the window as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Next button will move to the next step in the wizard, which is the Query Builder. With this Query builder, we can build our query based on the requirement of the report. We can use this screen in the same manner as we write a query in a Query Analyzer as shown in the screen below.

To make use of the query builder click on the Query Builder button. It will open a new window as shown in the screen below.

Now, a query has to be written to pull up the record as shown in the screen below. Once the query is written, click on the Execute button. This will give complete details of the data for our reference to finalize the query. We can do as many executes as required to get a final data as per the business requirement. This is shown in the screen below. Once done, click on OK to close this window and navigate back to the wizard.

This will load the query that we selected back in the wizard as shown in the screen below. Now click on Next to proceed further.

Now we can see an option to select the format in which the data can be displayed. The Wizard has two options (Tabular and Matrix) that can be used based on the requirement.

Once we select the required format and click on the Next button, we will get a window to select fields that has to be displayed. Here we have more control over the data display, such as; we can select the data that should be displayed at the header or to group the data in a particular format as shown in the screen below.

Once selected, click on the Next button to move to the next screen. The next screen allows selecting the layout of the report as shown in the screen below.

Selecting Stepped option and clicking on the Next button will open a new window to select the style. This will allow us to display the report with a good look and feel. The report wizard displays a list of styles available as shown in the screen below. Select the required style and click on Finish button to complete the wizard.

A summary of the options selected will be presented with the data source as shown in the screen below. Click on Finish button to complete the process.

Clicking on Finish button will open the report in the designer view of the Business Intelligence Development Studio as shown in the screen below.

Now Press F5 or hit the Play button from the tool bar to start building and executing the report. Once the process is started and we can see the report generation in progress as shown in the screen above.

Once the report generation is completed, we can see report in a nice format as shown in the screen below, which is also our expected output.

Summary
Therefore, in this article we have seen how to create a report in SQL Server Reporting Services using Business Intelligence Development Studio Report Wizard template.

Original post by ===>

Nov 8 2011 12:00AM by Karthikeyan Anbarasan   

Geting Started with SSRS - Part 1 - SQL Server Reporting Services Overview and Installing in Windows Server 2008

Geting Started with SSRS - Part 1 - SQL Server Reporting Services Overview and Installing in Windows Server 2008

Introduction
In this article, we would see what SQL Server Reporting Services are and a high-level overview of the architecture and the components involved in running reports on the SQL Server. This article is the first part of the series on SQL Server Reporting Services right from the architectural overview to running the customized report on different servers with deployment.
Overview
SQL Server Reporting Services provides a server based reporting platform, which allows customized reporting functionality for a variety of data that is transformed from different data sources. SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 provides a rich set of ready-to-use tools and services that help the developers and the designers to Create, Design, Deploy and Manage the Reports. It includes the basic report for the organization and provides customized reports with programming features to provide a rich user dashboard to extend and customize the functionality requirement.
SQL Server Reporting Services has a report server. It is a Windows Service with a set of features and runs separately in different application domains. SSRS has 2 components which are quite important for the architectural perspective. The first component is the Report Server, which acts as the heart of the report. Whenever a new report is created, it will be saved in the report server. It is the centralized location where all the reporting modules resides and provides an access to all the report. The second component is the Report Designer, which is also used to design the report and maintain the report design with the help of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 IDE or the latest IDE based on the requirement.
SQL Server Reporting Services also provides a useful feature of Scheduling and Delivery processor that pushes the reports to email inboxes or ftp locations based on the requirement. Now let us see the steps to install the SQL Server Reporting Services on to the development environment (We can make use of SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server Denali CTP3) and follow the step-by-step process.
Steps to Install SQL Server Reporting Services
Download Microsoft SQL Server Denali or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. In our series, we are going to use the latest version Denali reporting services. We can download the installer for SQL Server Denali CTP using the link Download SQL Server Denali CTP3

Once the download is completed, there will be 4 files downloaded as shown in the screen below. Now double click on the SQLFULL_x64_ENU_Install application file to extract the required files for installation. It would take some time to extract all the files to the same location as shown in the screen below.

Once the extraction is completed, refresh the folder. We will see a new folder created SQLFULL_x64_ENU as depicted in the screen below.

Now navigate through the folder. There will be a list of files as shown in the screen below. Point at Setup file and right-click on the file and select Run as administrator.
This will start the installation process. We can see the status message as shown in the screen below.

A new window will open leading to a step-by-step guide for installation process and some links providing help for our installation steps as shown in the screen below. We can now select the Hardware and Software Requirement to check the necessary things available for our installation. Else we can navigate to the link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506(v=sql.110).aspx and check for the same.

In the left hand side menu, navigate to Installation. The option New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation is listed as shown in the screen below. Click on the option to proceed further.

A set of Setup Support Rules runs is the background to check if the required process is available for installation. Once completed, a high-level result of how many rules failed or skipped is shown as depicted in the screen below.

To check the details of the passed results we need to click on the Show details button. This will showcase a complete list of rules ran and their result as shown in the screen below.

Now click on OK button. As the next step, a new window with evaluation options for the licenses is presented. Select Evaluation license or Express license as per the requirement. Since in this article we are going to evaluate the product installation we will select Evaluation from the list and click on Next button as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on Next button will navigate to the terms and conditions of the installation. Select the check box as shown in the screen below and click on Next button

A list of updates available to be downloaded and installed will be listed. As mentioned in the screen, it first installs the Setup Update (30MB). Remaining is downloaded & installed later. Click on Next to proceed further after selecting the updates as shown in the screen below.

Next we can see the Setup Update being downloaded as well as the status of the steps as shown in the screen below. Once the download is completed, click on Install to proceed further.

Next step is the new set of Setup Support Rules running and providing a result as depicted in the screen below. We can see two warnings. Since the server is domain controlled it shows the warning. Just ignore it and we can proceed further by clicking on Next button as shown in the screen below.

To proceed further the type of installation needs to be selected. Select SQL Server Feature Installation and click on Next as shown in the screen below.

This will present a list of Features that needs to be installed. An option of Select All is available at the bottom of the list to select the complete list. In addition, we can select shared feature directory option by selecting the folder as shown in the screen below. Click on Next button to proceed further.

Now we can see some set of Installation Rules running and get the result as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

Further, as a next step we need to provide instance with a Name. Here we have provided with DENALICTP as the instance name, then select the install root folder and click on Next button as shown in the screen below.

A summary will be presented showing the Disk Space available in the server and the required space for the installation of Denali CTP3 as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

A list of services and the Start-up type of each service (Manual or Automatic) will be shown based on the selection made as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

Now comes the Server configuration. We can use either Windows Authentication or the Mixed Authentication modes as per the requirement. Then provide a valid Password. At the bottom, we can see a button Add Current User, click on that button to add the current user to the list as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

Next is the Error Reporting option. If we need to report the error to Microsoft then we can initiate it by selecting the Check box as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

Now Configuration Rules will be triggered and provide the results as shown in the screen below. Click on Next to proceed further.

A summary of the list of service and applications that are going to be installed is presented as shown in the screen below. Click on INSTALL to proceed further and start the installation.

This will start the installation and the installer will do step-by-step process of installing all the necessary components as shown in the screen below.

Once the installation is completed we can see the result and the status as shown in the screen below. Click on Close to complete the process.

Summary
So in this first part of the series of articles. We have seen what SQL Server Reporting Services are and how to install it on a development environment to start designing the report. In our next article, we will see how to design a report using the Design wizard.

Original Post By:==>Nov 11 2011 12:00AM by Karthikeyan Anbarasan