Procedure: Add Navigation Support with the Document Map Feature
As
most of us are already aware, the Document Map feature
is not new with Reporting Services 2005. Many of us have implemented it
in Reporting Services 2000, and will find that the steps involved in enabling
and configuring the Document Map are quite similar in the current
version. Moreover, those of us who have been working with Reporting
Services for any length of time have also become aware of numerous
approaches to providing navigation support for the information consumers within
the organizations we serve. As we stated earlier, the Document Map provides
a great “out of the box” navigation tool which, by itself, or perhaps in
conjunction with other means of “getting around,” can help us to meet the
requirements of users. Indeed, I have found the Document Map to be of
assistance in the design and development phase of reporting engagements, even
when it might prove less than ideal for specific navigation requirements within
reports that are ultimately deployed to production scenarios.
Let’s rejoin
our new report in Layout view and make the necessary settings to support
the navigation capabilities requested by the information consumers.
1.
Open the DBJ_OLAP_Report.rdl
(or your own choice of a similar report) in the Solution Explorer, if it
is not already open from the steps above.
2.
Click the Layout
tab, as necessary, to transit to the Layout view.
DBJ_OLAP_Report.rdl
opens in Layout
view.
We are
now positioned to enable the report to support navigation with the Document
Map. We will do so from within the Layout view, where we will again
traverse the handful of dialogs and tabs that we passed through in establishing
the Product group we added earlier. We will begin, once more, within
the Matrix Properties settings.
3.
On the canvas
area of the Layout tab, right-click the upper left-hand corner of the Matrix
Data Region, as we did within our preparation steps earlier.
4.
Select Properties
from the context menu, once
again.
The Matrix
Properties dialog appears, defaulted to the General tab, as we saw
earlier.
5.
Click the
Groups tab.
6.
Click the top
entry in the Rows list, matrix1_Sales_Reason, to select it.
7.
Click the Edit
... button to the right of the Rows list, as shown in Illustration 17.
Illustration 17: Editing
the First Group’s Settings
The Grouping
and Sorting Properties dialog once again appears, defaulted to its General
tab, as we saw earlier. It is here that we associate the label that is to
appear in the new Document Map with the corresponding Group label,
as we shall see.
8.
Using the
downward pointing arrow on the right side of the Document map label box
(just underneath the Group on / Expression section of the General
tab), select =Fields!Sales_Reason.Value within the selector, as depicted
in Illustration 18.
Illustration 18:
Selecting a Value for the Document Map Label Property ...
We are
simply assigning the same value to the Document Map label as we have
assigned to the Group on Expression (and, by default, to the Group
label that appears on the report at runtime). We might have been more
sophisticated, and used a combination of fields, or even a function-driven
label (I have used conditional logic within expressions, as an example,
to generate the labels in Document Map trees for various clients
in the past), instead of a simple value.
9.
Click OK,
to accept our selection, and to close the Grouping and Sorting Properties dialog.
We
return to the Groups tab.
10.
Click the
second entry in the Rows list on the Groups tab, matrix1_Product,
to select it.
11.
Click the Edit
... button to the right of the Rows list, as we did for the previous
group.
We arrive
again at the General tab of the Grouping and Sorting Properties
dialog, as before. All that remains at this point is to associate the label
that is to appear in the new Document Map for the Product group with
the respective Group label.
12.
Using the
downward pointing arrow on the right side of the Document map label box,
just as before, select =Fields!Product.Value within the selector, as
shown in Illustration 19.
Illustration 19:
Selecting a Value for the Document Map Label for Product ...
Once
again, we see that the assignment of the label, particularly in a
situation where we want the label to be identical to the Group label
itself, is the ultimate in simplicity. The straightforwardness of the steps
involved is even more pronounced when we consider the fact that simply assigning
a single Document Map label drives the enablement itself of the Document
Map.
13.
Click OK,
to accept our selection, and to close the Grouping and Sorting Properties dialog, once again.
14.
Click OK
on the Groups tab, to close the Matrix Properties dialog.
We
return to the Layout view, where we are now ready to verify the effectiveness
of our modifications, and to witness the operation of the new Document Map
in action.
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