Business development often requires analysis and data mining. Determining trends with which Customers and other stake holders deal with a business are of sole importance to the business. In fact, helping a businessman to grow his business has contributed a lot in rapid growth of IT industry.
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting services provide a solution to those tasked in finding business trends. Briefly speaking:
Reporting services lets you create rich reports and format them based on your requirements.
You can create interactive reports using parameters. Also, RS comes with an API to generate complex reports.
You can assign permissions to specific users for viewing reports.
The phenomenon goes like:
a) As a developer, you will first need to create .RDL (Report Definition files) using SQL Server Business Intelligence studio. This file has xml syntax to define your report and in this file you can specify the data source of your report and how the report will be displayed.
b) Once you are done with creating RDL File, you will need to deploy it on Report Server which manages all reports and information kept in reports on backend. Some of its tasks involve keeping metadata of reports, Data source information for reports and cached reports. All of this information is kept in SQL Server databases which you will configure as part of configuring Reporting services.
c) Once you have developed and deployed reports on report server, users can view reports using report manager which uses report server on backend.
Creating a report
1. Open SQL Server Business Intelligence studio and create a new report server wizard project.
You can also create Report Server project instead but at this stage, it is recommended you start with a wizard project.
2. Once you have created the project, you can specify the data source from where to bring data for our report.
3. In the next step, you can specify the query to fetch data which would be used in your report.
4. Next comes different options for formatting your report and that can be done using your preference as to how you want to display your data.
5. Once you have report defined via wizard, you will be able to edit it using Business Intelligence studio.
6. You can define the layout of report using the toolbox at the left. And before you build and deploy your report, you can preview it here as well. Note that a report to be accessible in another project, say in ASP.Net website on developer machine, you would need to deploy the report on report server. Also, any change in report would require you to re-deploy the report in order to reflect the latest change.
7. This completes our process of creating a report and deploying it on report server.
