Create
a Basic Report from Scratch as Our Second Target Report
The
last member of our practice report set will be a simple "message" report.
This report will exist as a "second option" for drillthrough, and
will not even require an underlying dataset. As we stated in our introductory
comments, the point is to focus on the linkages between the launch and
target reports, and to be distracted by peripheral report authoring, or
other considerations, as little as possible. While the business environment
would likely demand far more, we will design this report to simply generate a
statement that "no data is available" for a given Sales Territory
Group selection – a straightforward scenario with which to illustrate conditional
drillthrough.
1.
Right-click
the Reports folder, once again, within in the Solution Explorer.
2.
Select Add
-> New Item ... from the cascading context menus
that appear, as depicted in Illustration 54.
Illustration 54: Select
Add -> New Item ...
The Add
New Item – AdventureWorks Sample Reports dialog appears.
3.
Select Report
within the Templates section of the dialog.
4.
Type the
following into the Name box at the bottom of the dialog:
RS033_TARGET_No_Data.rdl
The Add
New Item – AdventureWorks Sample Reports dialog appears as shown in Illustration
55.
Illustration 55: Add New
Item – AdventureWorks Sample Reports Dialog
The
dialog closes and the report file is created. The Report Designer
opens, defaulting to the Data tab.
As we have learned from our client colleagues, only text
is needed to support the simple target report requirement. We will add a textbox data region,
along with text, to the report canvas on the Layout tab.
6.
Click the Layout
tab.
7.
From the Toolbox,
drag a textbox data region to the Layout tab, as depicted in Illustration
56.
Illustration 56: Adding
a Textbox Data Region ...
The textbox
appears on the report canvas, as shown in Illustration 57.
Illustration 57: The
Textbox Appears on the Report Canvas
8.
Click inside
the Textbox, to ensure the cursor is resident there.
9.
Type the
following text into the textbox.
Data is not currently available for selected year.
10.
With the
cursor still inside the textbox, click the Bold button in the
toolbar.
11. Click the Italics button
next, as depicted in Illustration
58.
Illustration 58: Applying
Formatting to the Newly Added Text ...
12.
Click the
border of the textbox, to select the textbox itself.
13. Placing the cursor over the
left edge of the textbox (the cursor turns into a multi-directional
arrows icon), grab the textbox and drag it to the left edge of the
canvas, as shown in Illustration
59.
Illustration 59: Align
the New Textbox with the Left Edge of the Canvas
14. Placing the cursor over the
right edge of the textbox (the cursor turns into a double-headed arrows
icon), grab the edge of the textbox and widen it until the text inside
it is fully visible, as depicted in Illustration 60.
Illustration 60: Widen
the Textbox Until the Text Inside is Fully Visible
15.
Select File
-> Save All from the main menu, as we did
earlier.
We now
have a complete set of basic reports – enough to allow us to perform setup of conditional
drillthrough in the next section. As an aside, within data regions we can
typically use the NoRows property to perform the function of the simple
second target report we have created in this procedure. Within the context of
our specific example, we could likely have set this property for the launch
report matrix; rather than having a "message report," such as our
second target report, to return "no data," we might have placed the "data
is not ... available" message within the NoRows property.
Our
purposes here are simply to create a set of working reports quickly to allow us
to focus on conditional drillthrough. The procedures we use to do so with
the reports we have created, including this unlikely second target report,
would be similar if each target report were a sophisticated, fully formatted
report, with obvious report-specific differences in parameters to be passed,
and so forth.
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