Microsoft® SQL Server® Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports

Chapter 2. Basic Report Design Concepts

The purpose of this chapter is to lay the foundation for the techniques you will use as you apply report design recipes in the later sections. This chapter is designed to be a short refresher course on techniques with which you should already have some experience. We expect that you already have solid foundation of basic report design in your skill set, but this might help to fill some gaps. You can use this as a reference for applying the basic techniques of report design that you will need to know when using the recipes. At the very least you should already know how to:

• Create a new report in the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder 2.0/3.0 report designer

• Deploy or save the report to the report server

• Create an embedded or shared data source

• Create a dataset and common data sources like SQL Server or Analysis Services databases

• Understand basic T-SQL query syntax

• Add a simple table data region to a report

• Define groups with a report data region

• Define and use parameters for basic query or dataset filtering

Portions of this chapter were borrowed from our previous book; Professional SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services. In this abbreviated version, we do not include the tutorial instructions for using all of these features. You will find some hands-on instructions for applying many of these techniques in the recipes that follow. Most recipes will provide high-level directions for performing these basic report design tasks ...