MSSQL Server Reporting Services: Master Chart Reports: Pie Charts in Reporting Services - Page 2

Create a Pie Chart Report in Reporting Services

Objective and Business Scenario

In the following sections, we will perform the steps required to create a pie chart report to meet a business need as expressed by a hypothetical group of organizational information consumers. We will base our report datasets on the AdventureWorks2000 sample OLTP database that accompanies the installation of Reporting Services.

For purposes of our practice procedure, we will assume that information consumers within the Purchasing department of the AdventureWorks2000 organization have expressed the need for a pie chart report. The consumers have stated that they intend to use it within various other Microsoft Office applications, including PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and, ultimately, within other reports. They need a report that presents the concentration of our organizational vendors, by state, for numerous analytical ventures. To begin, however, they are interested in only three states: Washington, California, and Oregon. These states, they tell us, contain the lion's share of our vendors.

Once we understand the business need, we begin the process of creating the chart report to satisfy the information consumers.

Considerations and Comments

The report that we will create involves the sample MSSQL Server 2000 database, AdventureWorks2000, which accompanies the installation of Reporting Services. At the time of writing, the Service Pack 1 update is assumed for Reporting Services and the related Books Online and Samples.

For purposes of this exercise, we will create a Reporting Services project within the Visual Studio.Net 2003 Report Designer environment, within which we will work primarily with a Chart data region. While the construction of a pie chart is simple enough to follow, ensure that you have the authority, access and privileges, within both MSSQL Server and Reporting Services, needed to establish a data connection and accomplish the process and that performing these operations within the AdventureWorks2000 database presents no other issues in your environment.

If the sample AdventureWorks2000 database was not created as part of the initial Reporting Services installation, or was removed prior to your beginning this article, please see the Reporting Services documentation, including the Installation Notes, for the procedure to create the database, and direction to the appropriate files. As of this writing, a copy of the samples can be obtained from the installation CD or via download from the appropriate Microsoft site(s).

Hands-On Procedure

Preparation

Create a Reporting Services Project

To begin, we will launch Reporting Services' Report Designer, found in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003.

The equivalent on my PC appears as shown in Illustration 1.

The New Project dialog appears. We note that Business Intelligence Projects appears in the Project Types tree, indicating an installation of Reporting Services (the folder was added by the installation of Reporting Services, as it established the Report Designer in Visual Studio .NET).

RS008

The New Project dialog appears, with our additions, as shown in Illustration 3.

Our new project appears in the Solution Explorer (upper right corner of the Visual Studio .NET interface), as we see in Illustration 4.

We have now created a Report Project, and are ready to proceed with creating the new report.