Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

6.2. Accessing a SharePoint List

One of the really useful features of SSRS is its ability to populate a dataset through accessing web service methods. And, in the world of SharePoint, that makes an even bigger impact, since all of SharePoint lists are served out through web services. So, for this section, you will see how to make a very basic report that brings a SharePoint list into SSRS and formats the data into a fairly professional looking report.

6.2.1. STEP 1: Getting Prepared

The first thing you will need is a SharePoint list, obviously. For this example, you can use the Tasks list of any SharePoint installation. The list used in this example has five task items mimicking the five steps outlined earlier this chapter in creating a linked server, as you can see in Figure 6-30.

Figure 6-30. Figure 6-30

In SharePoint, you can access list specific methods using the following URL pattern:

http://<server-url>/_vti_bin/lists.asmx

Since the task list in Figure 6-29 was located in a site collection using the domain http://jacobsanford, the URL to retrieve list methods would be the following:

http://jacobsanford/_vti_bin/lists.asmx

In your own project, you will need to use the domain that corresponds to your own server hosting. However, for the remainder of this chapter, the domain http://jacobsanford will be used. Each time you see this in this chapter, please substitute in the ...