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

7.1. Creating a Custom Solution

Don't misinterpret the introduction to this chapter. SSRS is a very powerful tool that can do a lot of really cool things that will solve most of your reporting needs. Do you want to create a dashboard of eye-catching gauges or three-dimensional exploding pie charts? You can. Do you want to create drilldown reports that are linked from the pie pieces to a more grid-like display? You can. Do you want to create invoices to ship out to clients? You can. Do you want to create reports on the peer review evaluation cycle your company just went through with individual reports and pie charts for each employee? You can. For probably 95 percent of the reporting needs you will face, SSRS can provide the solution out of the box.

But what happens for that other five percent? Even if that doesn't sound like a huge percentage, when the CIO of your company is demanding something that falls into the five percent category, it is the most important thing in the world. So what do you do? How extensible is SSRS really?

There are a number of ways to address this five percent gap; this chapter will show you one approach that will probably allow you to handle almost all of these types of solutions: go outside of SSRS to fix the problem. This will make more sense as the chapter progresses.

One thing to remember as you are reading this chapter is that, in the world of reporting, regardless of what you are using to generate your reports, the reports are only as good as the ...