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

6.3. Summary

Chapter 5 provided you with a good start on your journey to mastering Reporting Services. You learned some best practices and saw a lot of how-to's on formatting and element manipulation. But it could almost be called the cheater's tour because you used a wizard to create your reports. You didn't see or understand anything that was going on under the hood and wouldn't be able to create a custom report from scratch with what you had learned in that chapter. Don't misunderstand; the concepts in that chapter were necessary and valid. But you needed to go to the next level to begin getting a grasp of how SSRS works.

This chapter started taking you to the next level. You got a lot deeper dive into the fundamentals of report design and generation. You saw how to create a new report from scratch. You saw how to create custom data sources and datasets for your project, how to add your reporting elements to your report, and how to connect the two. You saw how to group your report data into logical units and how to toggle the related detail data from merely clicking on the group row header. With this, you should have a better idea of what goes on under the hood when you use the report wizard to create your own reports, and, if you ever have a problem with a report created using the wizard, you should have the understanding to be able to go in and fix it.

Beyond that, you also were exposed to accessing SharePoint information directly in your report via the List web service. ...