Building Your First Report in Visual Studio .NET

Encoder QR in Visual Studio .NET Building Your First Report

You can manage published reports by using Report Manager, which is supplied by Reporting Services. Management of reports includes such activities as setting report properties and execution properties, managing content in folders, and applying security on the Report Server to control how users access and interact with reports. You perform only a few management tasks in this chapter. (You ll learn about all the management tasks in Part III, Managing the Report Server. )

Each report has a set of properties pages that you must manage. You need to know how to use the Report Manager to find these properties and to review the types of properties you can manage. In this procedure, you ll navigate from the Home page of Report Manager to the Properties page of your report. Open the report s Properties page 1. Open Internet Explorer. 2. Type the URL http://localhost/Reports to open the Report Manager. The Home page of Report Manager is displayed:

Part I:

The folder contents are displayed:

Notice that this page has a Properties tab in addition to the Contents tab. (You ll learn more about managing folder properties in 9.) Currently, the Adventure Works folder contains only one report, the Sales Summary report that you just published. 4. Click the Sales Summary link. Reporting Services generates and displays the Sales Summary report:

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The View tab is displayed by default when you open a report. Three other tabs are available for this report: Properties, History, and Subscriptions. In this section, you review the Properties page. Later, in 7, you ll learn more about the other tabs. Tip

5. Click the Properties tab. The Properties page for the Sales Summary report is displayed:

On this page, you can see the author and also the date the report was created. The modification author and date of modification match creation information until the report is subsequently modified. Notice that you can change the name of the report on this page and add a description. The other tasks that you can perform on this page are covered later in 9. Notice the links in the left frame of the browser window. The many types of report properties are logically organized into separate pages, where you can apply changes to current settings. Properties determine, for example, how the report appears in Report Manager, how users can interact with the report, and how the Report Server connects to the data sources. You ll review report properties in greater detail in 9.

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Often, you will want to add a description so a user knows what your report contains before opening it. This property is accessible on the main properties page of the report. In this procedure, you ll add a description and observe how a description is displayed on the Contents page of a folder. Add a description 1. In the Description box, type Actual sales by year, territory, and salesperson. Your screen looks like this:

This report description is displayed on the Contents page and, importantly, is visible only to users who have been granted permission to view the report. 2. Click Apply. Clicking Apply doesn t appear to change anything. However, the report description is now visible on the Contents page of the Adventure Works folder. 3. Click the Adventure Works folder link at the top-left corner of the browser window.

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Your screen looks like this:

Execution properties are a subset of the report properties maintained for each report. When you understand the implications of the execution property settings, you can choose the most appropriate property setting for your reporting environment. Execution properties allow you to manage reports by balancing system resources and performance with the users information requirements. For example, you set up caching to achieve a reasonable balance when data used in the report is not changing rapidly at the source. To use caching, you first need to change the data sources properties so you can assign logon credentials that will be used to execute the report for the cache. Separate logon credentials are required by Reporting Services to implement report caching in order to make a single report available to many users. In this procedure, you ll open the Execution Properties page for your report to review the available options. Open the report s Execution Properties page 1. Click the Sales Summary link. Assume for a moment that you ve just started a new browser session. Just like the previous time you opened this report, a message is displayed to let you know that several activities are occurring: Report is being generated . Each time a report executes on demand, as you initiated in this step, a query is executed to retrieve data from the

Part I: