Chapter 10: How Did We Ever Manage Without You? The Report Manager

Overview

In Part II of this book, we focused on report authoring. You learned fancy techniques for creating whiz-bang reports. However, the fact is, even the whiz-bangiest of reports are not much good if you cannot easily share them with end users.

In this chapter, you learn how to do just that. We move from authoring to managing reports and delivering them to the end users. This is done through the Report Server and its Report Manager web interface.

We took a brief look at the Report Server and the Report Manager in Chapter 1. Now, we take a more detailed look. Much of our examination focuses on the Report Manager, and how it is used to access and control the Report Server.

The first step is moving your report definitions and supporting files from the development environment to the Report Catalog. Recall that the Report Catalog is the SQL Server 2005 database where the Report Server keeps all its information. This information includes the definitions of the reports it is managing. We look at several ways to accomplish this report deployment.

Once your reports are available through the Report Server, you need to control how they are executed. We use the Report Server’s security features to control who can access each report, and we use the caching and report history to control how a report is executed each time it is requested by a user. Finally, we control all these Report Server features using the Report Manager.

In short, in this chapter, we take your reports from a single-user development environment to a secure, managed environment where they can be executed by a number of users.