CHAPTER 13 CREATING REPORTS USING REPORT BUILDER 1.0, 2.0, AND 3.0Creating a Report Model
The report model will add a layer of separation between report designers and the underlying data
source, simplifying the process of designing reports by allowing them to focus on report design and not
query design. Now that you have the data source view, which is a requirement for building a report
model, you will learn how to create the model. The process is straightforward, thanks to auto-generation
methods that analyze the data source view in two passes and produce the end result—a publishable
report model in which the constituent elements would have otherwise taken much time and effort to
produce, as you will see. The goal in this section is to walk you through the wizard so you can pay
attention to the generation methods and finally deploy your completed model to the SSRS server.
You will again utilize the right-click procedure to initiate the Report Model Wizard from the Report
Models folder in the Solution Explorer. After navigating past the first welcome page to the Select Data
Source View page, you are presented with the Pro SSRS 2008R2 data source view selection, as shown in
Figure 13-13.
Figure 13-13. Selecting a data source view
After selecting Pro SSRS, click Next, where you can now select the report model generation rules. You
will see a set of rules that will be performed on the data source view. Several rules exist, and most of
them are selected by default. Many of the rules are self-explanatory; however, two are not selected, by
default: Create Entities for Nonempty Tables and Create Attributes for Nonempty Columns. These two
rules instruct the generation process to create entities and attributes only for tables that contain data.