Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

17.3. Report Server Projects

Report models can be considered to be "scratching the surface" of things — Reporting Services has much more flexibility than that (indeed, I'm very sure there are entire books around just Reporting Services — there is that much to it). In addition to what you can do with the full Visual Studio environment, Business Intelligence Development Studio will allow you to create Report Server Projects.

As I mentioned before, there are entire books around just this subject, so the approach we're going to take here is again to give you something of a little taste of the possibilities through another simple example (indeed, we're just going to do the same example using the project method).

At this point, you should be fairly comfortable with several of the concepts we're going to use here, so I'll spare you the copious screenshots and get to the nitty gritty of what needs to be done to get us up to the point of new stuff:

1. Open a new project using the Report Server Project template in Business Intelligence Development Studio

2. Create a new datasource against the AdventureWorks database (right-click the Shared Data Source folder and fill in the dialog — use the Edit button if you want the helpful dialog to build your connection string, or you can just copy the connection string from earlier in the chapter).

3. Right-click the Reports folder and choose Add New Report — click past the now almost annoying "Welcome" dialog in the report wizard.

4. Select the datasource you created ...