Mastering OLAP Reporting: Meet Business Needs with Matrix Dynamics, Part 1 - Page 5

February 21, 2006

Preparation: Enhance the Report per the Business Requirements

As we noted in the Objective and Business Scenario section above, the client information consumers have outlined a few enhancements that they wished to make to the existing report, to outfit it to meet a specific business need that is different than the need addressed by the original report. Let's review the presentation that the current report file supports, and then add a matrix data region to the file that will replicate the existing data region.

Review the Layout and Operation of the Sample OLAP Report

RS026_Sales_Reason_Comp_Matrix.rdl opens in Layout view, and appears as depicted in Illustration 20.

Let's preview the report, so as to get a feel for its general operation prior to performing our enhancements.

Execution begins (the report initially executes with the default parameter setting).

The report executes, and appears as shown in Illustration 21.

Once we have seen the intended presentation of the report, we can return to the Layout view, where we will replicate the current data region with a new matrix data region, with which we can deliver the information presented in the original view, while adding the enhancements that the information consumers have requested.

We will create the new version of the existing matrix data region in the section that follows.