Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 26. Advanced Reporting Services Charting

In the last chapter, we introduced the fundamentals of SQL Server Reporting Services. Reporting Services allow you to quickly create visually appealing charts or formatted reports for print or export to other formats. We also explored the ability to produce OData feeds and discussed the use cases for doing so.

In this chapter, we develop some more advanced skills by building on the basic reporting we did in Chapter 25. We will first develop a basic drill-down report that allows us to drill through the members of our chart. We will then move on to a more advanced technique using JavaScript to spawn a new window with the drill-down report.

The second technique, while more complicated, is worth noting because it enables you to drill down to anything that supports a URL. You could drill into another report as we’ll show here, or into any web application. It’s not a technique that’s been broadly used, but it is very useful.

The mechanics of what we’re doing are pretty simple. We have an existing report that we’re going to enhance with a click-through action. When you click on a product line in the report, you will pass that selected product line as a parameter to a second report.

The first thing you need to do is create that second report. It’s no different than your first report other than accepting a parameter for a product line by which you will filter your data. Let’s do it!

Create a Drill-Down Report

Start by selecting the All Documents ...