MSSQL Server Reporting Services: The Authoring Phase: Overview Part II

About the Series …

This is the third article of the series MSSQL Server
2000 Reporting Services. The series is designed to introduce MSSQL
Server 2000 Reporting Services ("Reporting Services"), with the
objective of giving a preview of its features, as well as sharing my conviction
in its role as a new paradigm in enterprise reporting. As I advise clients on a
more and more frequent basis these days, this is the future in a big way. I hope
you will consider my input valuable, and that you will investigate closely the
savings and advanced functionality that will soon be available to anyone with
an MSSQL Server 2000 (and beyond) license.

Introduction

In our
last article, The
Authoring Phase: Overview Part I, we began an overview of the first of the main
phases of the enterprise reporting life cycle. We introduced the article with
observations surrounding the objectives of the MSSQL Server 2000
Reporting Services series, as well as the objectives of the initial
phase overview articles, and then discussed the Authoring phase in
general. We began an exploration of the steps involved in creating a blank
report, mentioning in passing the general ways of creating reports, each of
which we will revisit numerous times in later articles.

After
introducing the Authoring phase, we began a practice example in which we
set out to create a basic tabular report. First, we created the Report
Project to house the Report File, which we created next. Within the Report
File, we established a Data Connection, and then built a simple SQL
query to use against our specified data source, the AdventureWorks2000
sample OLTP database. We then designed the report Layout, and, finally,
added data from the dataset resulting from our query.

We are
now ready to pick up where we left off, and undertake the remaining steps of
our initial walkthrough of the Authoring phase. We will complete our exploration of the general Authoring
process, within the remaining activities of the hands-on practice example we
began in Part I, rejoining the tabular report as
we saved it, and taking the following steps:

• Perform
  modifications to the layout of our existing report, RS02_Authoring;

• Perform Grouping
  within the report;

• Modify the
  underlying Dataset for the report;

• Filter the Dataset;

• Add Subtotals
  and a Total;

• Set Properties
  and Formats for illustrative report components;

• Preview our work, throughout the article,
  to confirm the effects of our activities.

As we
mentioned in the first half of this two-part article, our intent is to perform
an overview of Authoring. We will return to various activities we touch
upon here, as well as to many of the topics we explore within the subsequent
two phase overviews, as we get involved in creating reports to accomplish
illustrative business needs. I intend to make this a series on enterprise
reporting in the widest sense. I have wanted to do this for years as a BI
consultant, but never had a unified, common platform from whence I could show
techniques and methods to support robust and creative business intelligence.
Before the advent of Reporting Services, we would have had to introduce
multiple tools to accomplish sophisticated solutions in many cases, but those
scenarios are now a thing of the past.

A new
era in enterprise reporting has dawned, as industry and analysts alike will
soon proclaim. Stay tuned – it will happen sooner than many appreciate, and
the exceptional benefits to analysts and other information consumers will
become the new standard.