Chapter 14. Creating and Managing Reports

Introduction

Understanding Reporting Services and RDL

Visual Studio 2005 Reporting

What Are the Visual Studio 2005 Report Tools?

Building Your First Report

Exploring the ReportViewer Class in Depth

Managing Server Reports

Managing Parameters

Advanced Reporting Techniques

Implementing the Matrix Report

Summary

Introduction

As many of you already know, Peter Blackburn and I spent over a year writing our previous book, Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Addison-Wesley, 2004). This work focuses on reporting technology originally targeted for SQL Server 2005, but when Yukon ^[1] slipped (and slipped again), the SQL Server team decided to integrate Reporting Services into SQL Server 2000. As a result, Reporting Services has proven to be a very popular new application genrewhat I call "the 5th Paradigm". As I see it, most applications are simply "data viewers ," written to capture data with forms and display this data in other forms or summaries and compilations of this data in the form of reports . As far as I'm concerned , any tool that can make this process easier makes sense.

^[1] Yukon: A province in northern Canada or the code- name for SQL Server 2005.

Reporting Services 2000 introduced (or leveraged) a Microsoft-owned proprietary standard RDL (XML) report definition language (that's open for other third parties to use), as well as a host of tools, SQL Server databases, an ASP.NET Web Service and a number of Windows services to host, manage, store, distribute, render, and protect the reports and the data they expose. In addition, Reporting Services 2000 includes a Visual Studio 2003based Report Designer that permits developers to author reports using the RAD features for which Visual Studio is famous.

This same Reporting Services toolset was leveraged to create the new Visual Studio 2005 ReportViewer control and Report Designerit closely resembles the Visual Studio 2003 version's Report Designer layout and preview panes. No, this chapter is not really about Reporting Services, but I think that if you understand the parentage of a body of code, you'll better understand its strengths, its weaknesses, and what's been improved (or lost) in the transition. While I'll give you a rudimentary overview of SQL Server Reporting Services in this chapter, I think that the 2005 version of Reporting Services is similar enough to the 2000 version that you should use our previous book as an in-depth reference.

Visual Studio 2005 takes up where Visual Studio 2003 left offsort of. Visual Studio 2005 no longer requires a separate after-market Reporting Services add-in to support SQL Server 2005 Reporting ServicesMicrosoft shipped an entirely separate instance of Visual Studio to host the Report Designer. This new SKU, called the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), is essentially the Visual Studio 2005 UI with the Report Designer built in. Does this mean that unless you have a SQL Server SKU, you won't be able to build RDL-based reports with Visual Studio? Ah, no. That's where the ReportViewer control comes into play.

That's what this chapter is abouthow to create new RDL reports in Visual Studio 2005, how to use the ReportViewer control to render them, and how to access RDL reports hosted by SQL Server Reporting Services. Since many of you have invested considerably in Reporting Services 2000 technology and created literally millions of RDL reports, I know that many of you want to know how to import the RDL report definitions into your Visual Studio 2005 report projectsI'll show you how to do that, too. So let's get to it.