C H A P T E R 3
Introduction to Reporting Services
Design with SQL Server Data Tools
The professional lines separating system administrators, DBAs, and developers are blurring. Products
are often extensible through code or at least have the potential to create functionality that goes well
beyond that of out-of-the-box offerings. SSRS is such an application. The days of the Microsoft
Management Console (MMC) are numbered and will be overshadowed by the new interface on the
block, the IDE, though even that isn’t new by any means, as any developer will tell you. However, system
administrators, DBAs, and even report designers have had to become familiar with this new way of
performing their day-to-day tasks. As you’re probably well aware, you can create reports for SSRS within
Visual Studio 2005 and up, or within BIDS/SSDT. To remind you of these abbreviations, the designer
included with SSRS 2005 through the 2008 R2 release was labeled as Business Intelligence Development
Studio (BIDS). However, in the 2012 release, Microsoft decided to re-label the designer as SQL Server
Data Tools (SSDT) because of the inclusion of features such as further development integration with SQL
Azure environments. The ability to use SSDT/BIDS is advantageous for Visual Studio developers,
because now they can use the same IDE for report creation and application development! For the rest of
us, creating reports in Visual Studio 2010 presents a learning curve.
SQL Server 2005 introduced two new management and development environments, BIDS, a subset
of Visual Studio 2005, and SSMS. In SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012, these applications have been
enhanced to improve the integration of design and management functionality in a common set of tools.
Now that you have developed your queries and stored procedures, you can turn your attention to
the tools available to report designers when SQL Server is installed. Over the next three chapters we’ll
familiarize you with the tools of report design before showing you how to create a full-blown SSRS report
in chapter 6. The topics we’ll cover include the following:
- The elements of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT/BIDS)
- The role of RDL in SSRS with sample code from the various report objects it
controls - Creating a data source and dataset
- Defining query and report parameters
- Discussing report pagination
- Defining expressions and filters to demonstrate how you can use them together to
control report content and formatting - Implementing Tablix properties, new in SSRS 2008, which extend the functionality
of several data regions by combining row grouping and column grouping