Practice
Preparation: Set up the Reporting Services Environment
For purposes of our practice session,
we will create a copy of the Foodmart Sales sample report (one of
several report samples, as we have said, that are available for installation with
Reporting Services). Creating a "clone" of the report means
we can make changes to our report while retaining the original sample in a
pristine state – perhaps for other purposes, such as using it to accompany
relevant sections of the Books Online, and other documentation, in
learning more about Reporting Services in general.
Before we can work
with a clone of the Foodmart Sales report, we need to create a Reporting
Services project in the Visual Studio.Net 2003 Report Designer
environment. Streamlining, and then making the enhancements to the report to
add the functionality to support the subject of our lesson, can be done easily
within the Reporting Services Report Designer environment.
Working with a copy of the report will allow us the luxury of freely exploring
our options, and leave us a working example of the specific approach we took,
to which we can refer in our individual business environments. If you already
have a project within which you like to work with training or development objects,
you can simply skip the Create a Reporting Services Project section.
If the sample FoodMart
2000 Analysis Services database or the Foodmart Sales report was not
created / installed as part of the initial installation of the associated
application, if either was removed prior to your beginning this article, or if
either or both applications have yet to be installed, etc., see the respective Books
Online and other documentation supplied with MSSQL Server, Analysis
Services and / or Reporting Services for the necessary procedures to
prepare for the exercises that follow.
Create
a Reporting Services Project
To
begin, we will launch Reporting Services' Report Designer, found in Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET 2003.
1.
Click Start.
2.
Navigate to,
and click, the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 shortcut in the Programs
group, as appropriate.
The
equivalent on my PC appears as depicted in Illustration 3.
Illustration
3: Beginning in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 ...
Visual
Studio .NET 2003 opens
at the Start page.
3.
Select File
--> New from the main menu.
4.
Click Project
from the cascading menu, as shown in Illustration 4.
Illustration
4: Selecting a New Project
The New
Project dialog appears. Business Intelligence Projects appears in
the Project Types tree, indicating an installation of Reporting
Services.
5.
Click Business Intelligence Projects in the Project Types tree, if necessary.
6.
Click Report
Project in the Templates list.
7.
Type the
following into the Name box, leaving other settings at default:
RS022_MDX_DRILLTHROUGH
8.
Navigate to a
location in which to place the Report Project files.
The New Project
dialog appears, with our input, as depicted in Illustration 5.
Illustration
5: The New Project Dialog, with Our Input
Our
new project appears in the Solution Explorer (upper right corner
of the Visual Studio .NET interface), as we see in Illustration 6.
Illustration
6: The New Project Appears in the Solution Explorer
Having
created a Report Project, we are ready to proceed with creating
the new report clone.
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