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

Part IX. Games

• Hangman Game

• Sea Battle Game

HANGMAN GAME

Reporting Services has the capability to build dynamic functionality into a report design. Using parameters, expressions and custom code, you can control the report behavior and customize a user's experience, enabling some interesting possibilities. This recipe shows you how some members of the SQL Server Reporting Services product team created a simple Hangman game to demonstrate report drill-through techniques to showcase at industry conferences. This report was developed to show at the earlier "BI Power Hour" sessions at some of the regular annual conferences. Since this demonstration, several other demos have been produced for games like Mastermind, Battleship and Monopoly. The game tactics and logic rules may vary but the core techniques are the same.

If your objective is to learn game programming, there are more capable game development tools than Reporting Services. The purpose of this recipe is not so much about learning to write games using Reporting Services but to expose you to some useful techniques you can use when designing advanced reporting solutions.

Product Versions

• Reporting Services 2000

• Reporting Services 2005

• Reporting Services 2008

What You'll Need

• Images to represent the hangman's body parts

• Stored procedure to update database table

• Conditional expressions to hide and show images

• Hangman.rdl

• Hangman.bak—database backup

Techniques Demonstrated

• Drill-through-to-self report action

• Table and textbox report actions

• Parameterized ...