Datasheet

platforms. But just because Reporting Services is a business-sized product, this doesn’t mean that reports
have to be complicated or difficult to design.
Report users need to be connected to a network, or perhaps the Internet, with connectivity to the report
server. When a report is selected for viewing from a folder in the Report Manager, it is displayed as a
web page in the user’s web browser. Optionally, the same report can be displayed in a number of differ-
ent formats including Adobe PDF or Excel, or as a TIFF image. Reports may be saved to files in these
and other formats for offline viewing. Reports may also be scheduled for automatic delivery by the
report server by e-mail or may be saved to files. These features are standard and require only simple
configuration settings and minor user interaction.
User-Designed Reports
Reporting Services in SQL Server 2005 introduces an alternative to predesigned, server-side reports.
Standard reports are designed for users by a report designer or developer ahead of time and deployed to
the server for users to select and display, print. or save to a file. This may be useful for standard reporting
needs shared by most report users. However, savvy users cannot modify the design or these standard
reports without access to the design and development tools. The Report Builder allows users to build their
own reports on the fly, using prepared queries and data models. Using this option, the report designer or
system administrator can prepare a variety of common data models to simplify and expose the underlying
data sources in a concise form. This allows users to construct ad hoc reports using simple drag-and-drop
techniques. These reports may be saved for others to use or to be built upon in later sessions.
The actual design work is performed using a client-side builder tool delivered on demand in the user’s
web browser. The user experience is quite simple. As far as the user is concerned, a new report is created
using a simple web page selection and the Report Builder opens in a browser window without specifi-
cally installing a software package ahead of time. These reports are stored on the server in the same
folder space as other reports. The Report Manager web interface is used to access and maintain standard
Reporting Services reports as well as Report Builder reports and their associated data models.
The advantages of Report Builder reports are that they give users the ability to design and customize
their own reports without involving a report designer or developer. Report styles and features include
standard report layouts like columnar, hierarchal, pivot/matrix, and charts.
Report Builder reports cannot contain custom expressions or custom code. Data-formatting options are lim-
ited and the data models must be prepared ahead of time. Models may be created to mirror the details of
source data tables or may be simplified. This allows the data model designer to hide sensitive data and to
simplify complex data sources with alias columns aggregations and calculated data members.
Designing Reports
The report designer is integrated into the Microsoft Development Environment, which also is the plat-
form used for the SQL Server 2005 design and administration tools. In Reporting Services for SQL Server
2000, report design was performed exclusively using Visual Studio. Now reports may be designed and
created using either Visual Studio 2005 or the Business Intelligent Studio, both of which are implementa-
tions of the development environment.
9
What Can You Do with Reporting Services?
05_584979_ch01_2.qxp 8/14/06 10:13 AM Page 9