Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 25. Reporting Services Basics

What Is Reporting Services?

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) enables IT professionals, developers, and end users to create screen- or print-ready formatted reports in a variety of styles. You can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from relational databases or cubes quickly and easily. Reports can be designed with charts, maps, and sparklines. You can publish reports, schedule delivery, or request reports on-demand. You can select from a variety of viewing formats, export reports to other applications such as Microsoft Excel, and subscribe to published reports. Reporting Services reports can be served right from your SharePoint site or integrated into custom applications via a URL or web service access. You can also create data alerts on reports published to a SharePoint site and receive email messages when reporting data changes.

In additional to its role as a visual report generator, Reporting Services also provides an OData feed for each of the datasets in a report. These feeds can be used as an OData source for our LightSwitch application or for a PowerPivot or tabular cube.

Report Architecture

Let’s start with a quick introduction to the major components of a Reporting Services solution. A data source stores the connection information about the endpoint we’re going to connect to. Many providers are available for Reporting Services data sources, including SQL Server, Analysis Services, Oracle, and SAP BW. Remember ...