Simple Bar Chart for Analysis Services Data

Let’s ascertain the accuracy and completeness of our construction efforts. We will execute the report with the following steps:

The new report generates, displaying both the original matrix and new Bar chart data regions.

The simple Bar chart data region appears as shown in Illustration 43.

We can easily verify the displayed simple Bar chart totals against the matrix data region (by adding together each of the two years’ totals for any given Territory Group / Sales Reason, and comparing that total to the corresponding total in the matrix data region).

Our simple Bar chart meets the expressed business requirements and demonstrates many details surrounding its property settings. The client representatives express satisfaction with our efforts, and state that, with a few cosmetic changes (including the simple removal of the existing matrix data region, and the subsequent realignment of the Bar chart on the canvas), the report will be ready for deployment to the targeted information consumer group. Moreover, they assure us that the details they have examined within the practical exercise we have undertaken can be extrapolated to their creation efforts of other simple Bar charts.

As we can see from our examination above, Reporting Services offers a wide range of options for simple Bar chart creation and manipulation to assist us in the delivery of information within the business environment. We extend our examination of chart types, specifically examining each type, together with the properties and methods we can manipulate for the precise presentations we seek to be able to deliver, in other articles of this series.

Conclusion

In this article, we performed a relatively straightforward examination of the Reporting Services simple Bar chart type, from within a copy of an existing sample Reporting Services report that we created for this purpose. Our focus, as we stated in the introduction, was to create a basic, working Bar chart, using an Analysis Services data source (the Adventure Works DW sample OLAP database / Adventure Works cube that accompanies the installation of Reporting Services), and to discuss various characteristics of the Bar chart type as we progressed.

We examined relevant chart properties, and got some hands-on exposure to the manipulation of those properties to support the delivery of information to meet the needs of a hypothetical group of organizational information consumers. We noted that this article would serve as a basis, in some cases, for other, more advanced articles within the MSSQL Server Reporting Services series, where we use the simple Bar chart we created here as a starting point from which we can concentrate on in-depth procedures and nuances to achieve precision in meeting specific requirements and data presentation effects that we might deliver in the business environment.

About the MSSQL Server Reporting Services Series ...

This article is a member of the series MSSQL Server Reporting Services. This monthly column is designed to introduce MSSQL Server Reporting Services (“Reporting Services”), presenting an overview of its features, with tips and techniques for real-world use. For more information on the series in general, please see my initial Database Journal article, A New Paradigm for Enterprise Reporting.