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

5.3. Summary

When this chapter started, you were probably fairly new to creating reports in SQL Server Reporting services. While the previous chapters had prepared you for generating reports (and, admittedly, there is a lot of preparation necessary to get to the point where you are ready to generate reports), you hadn't really gotten too far into report generation. In fact, other than an overview of the development tools used to create reports, your exposure to reports was pretty limited to this point.

However, this chapter attempted to get you started in report development. The example was a very simple one but allowed you to get exposed to the nuts and bolts of creating reports in SSRS. You learned some best practices, for example. You know that you should keep your data in the data layer and just display it in SSRS. You now know that you should use a shared data source for your reports much in the same way you would use your connection string information in your web.config in a .NET application.

You also saw how to use the Report Wizard to generate a very basic report. In doing so, though, you also learned some reporting concepts like the difference between tabular and matrix reports and how they are used in typical reports. You saw how powerfully simple the wizard is but also saw some of the formatting flaws of its final result and how to fix them.

You saw how easy it was to add a chart to your report and bind it to your report's existing data source. You saw some of the easy ...