Chapter 11. Working with Report Items

In This Chapter

• Data Regions, Containers, and Independent Report Items

• Report Designer's Toolbox

• Line Report Item

• Rectangle Report Item

• Image Report Item

• Textbox Report Item

• Table Report Item

• List Report Item

• Practical Application of Report Items

• Matrix Report Item

• Chart Report Item

• Practical Application of Chart and Matrix

• Report Body Versus Page Header/Footer

Now that the book has covered what is necessary to retrieve data, let's move on to designing reports. This chapter goes into the Toolbox (literally and figuratively) and discusses the various controls used for building reports and the resulting RDL. Toward the end of the chapter, we will generate a couple of reports .

Presentation elements in SSRS are called report items. These include: Table, Matrix, List, Chart, Textbox, Image, Line, Rectangle, and Subreport.

Report items are very similar to visual controls available in Visual Studio languages, such as Visual Basic or C#. This book introduced you to report items in Chapter 2, "Reporting Services Capabilities: Presentation, Navigation, and Programmability." This chapter provides more details on each of these items.

You might have noticed that the set of report items did not change in SSRS 2005. However, Microsoft has expanded the capabilities of report items, and some items can now do more. For example, the Textbox in SSRS 2005 provides interactive sorting capabilities.