Pro SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

CHAPTER 3  INTRODUCTION TO REPORTING SERVICES DESIGN WITH SQL SERVER DATA TOOLS

report development into the hands of report requesters. Report Builder 3.0, released with SQL Server

2008 R2, had even more features for ad hoc end-user reporting. Report Builder 1.0 and 2.0 are still

available for backward compatibility, and 1.0 still relies on report models for its data sources, unlike 2.0

and 3.0. Chapter 13 covers Report Builder 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 applications, and their components, in more

detail.

Throughout this chapter, we’ll present the RDL sections of the report objects on which you are

working to show how the RDL is updated while designing a report. The complete RDL schema is

available at http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition.

Adding a Report

In line with Microsoft’s general policy, there is more than one way to add a report to a project. One way

is to employ a wizard to work through the report creation process, but for now, we are just going to add a

blank report to our project. Right-click the Reports folder in the Solution Explorer, select Add, and then

New Item. Notice that you have the option of adding an existing item as well. This option is useful if you

already have a report to add to a project or if you’ve built a template report file as a base starting point.

For now, select Report in the Add New Item dialog box as shown in Figure 3-5 below, and then click Add

to create a blank report named Report1.rdl in the project.

Figure 3-5. Add New Item Dialog Box in BIDS

The new report should open up in the design environment, but if it doesn’t, double-click the new

report in the Solution Explorer. By default the report is named Report##.rdl, where ## is the next

available report number in sequence. At this point, the report is a blank slate. Figure 3-6 shows the IDE,

including the Solution Explorer, Toolbox and Report Data boxes. If you are familiar with creating reports

in Visual Studio 2005, you will notice that the Data tab has been separated from the Design and Preview

tab and now resides in a dedicated Report Data window. In the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, we were