I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and it looks like David Lean beat me to it earlier this year by posting an incredibly thorough four-part discussion of how to do conditional formatting in Reporting Services . I’ve played with his sample code...

Reports and report models can be localized at many levels. Following are some ideas around the current support in SQL Server 2008 for each type of localization. - Localized metadata at report design time o Example : Spanish report author sees...

Customer report models that vary in size from a few to a few hundred entities. Little Northwind with its 10 or so entities comes in around 200K, but we've seen models a hundred times that size (over 20 MB). One of the key drivers of model size is the...

SQL Server 2008 SP1 is now available, and includes some important updates related to Report Builder 2.0: - RB 2.0 can now be deployed directly from the report server using ClickOnce. You can also configure whether RB 1.0 or RB 2.0 is launched from...

Report Builder 2.0 makes it easy for business users to browse for and use centrally-defined and managed data sources. It does this by supporting direct connection to a report server as part of the design experience. It also maintains a list of recently...

Most people using Report Builder 2.0 with a report model soon ask the question, what is that extra column I get back with strange values like “AC8AAAA=” in it? Answer: It's an entity key value . If you’re going to create a group on that entity in your...

Are you using a report model in your organization? The Reporting Services product team wants to hear from you ! What type of organization is using the model (dept/workgroup, small/mid business, enterprise)? How long have you been using your model...

As I mentioned in a previous post , due to resource constraints in this release, Report Builder 2.0 is not a strict superset of RB 2005/1.0. One of the features missing from RB 2.0 is automatic creation of Clickthrough links . You can still get them,...

I've been playing around with a report model we use internally here in the SQL Server product group. At a conceptual level, the data being modeled makes heavy use of inheritance (EntityA "is a" EntityB), but in working with the model and with Report Builder...

Just a quick post to answer the inevitable question when those familiar with Report Builder 2005/1.0 start playing with Report Builder 2.0 : Whither report models? The short answer is that they are still available as a data source type, and the...

In SQL 2005 the semantic queries generated by Report Builder do not support sorting. This is not a problem in the report itself, because all sorting is defined and implemented in the report definition instead of the query. However, for parameter dropdowns...

Since releasing Report Builder almost two years ago, we've found that many users run into difficulty at some point with filtering on totals . A classic example of this is, "show me a list of customers with more than $5000 in Accessory sales." "Accessory...

Some customers have report models that are large enough they do not expect any user to ever request the entire model, and would actually prefer to disallow that option, and require them to choose a perspective instead. There is an undocumented and unsupported...

A number of people have asked if it is possible to launch RB from the command line. While it is in fact possible, it is an unsupported feature in SQL Server 2005. That said, here's how to do it. You just need to specify what report server to connect to...

The Filter dialog in Report Builder has a little checkbox near the bottom that many users have asked about. The checkbox label says, "When adding a new condition, apply to all data in my report." The effect of selecting this checkbox is that when subsequent...

I call this the Primary Address problem, because a classic example is when you have a Customer table and an Address table, and each customer can have many addresses (Primary, Billing, Shipping, etc.), but no more than one of any given type. If you have...

In this release of Report Builder there is no direct support for referencing parameters in the Formula dialog. They will show up if you edit a prompted filter condition as a formula, but there is no way to directly insert a parameter reference. ...

One thing Report Builder users need to be aware of when building a report is the difference between an entity group , which displays exactly one instance for each row in the underlying table, and a value group , which displays one instance for each distinct...

Huge new feature: integrate your RS 2005 report server with SharePoint 12! What's new in SP2? Download here.

I've attached a sample C# project illustrating how to create a custom data processing extension ( more info ) that enforces a maximum timeout on any SQL queries submitted to it, including those generated from Report Builder. To try it out: Open...

Many factors combine to make report models highly likely to change and evolve over time. Sometimes the underlying schema changes. Sometimes new stuff is added. Sometimes you just want to improve how the schema is presented to users. Report models are...

Sometimes it is useful to create a report model that can be used against multiple databases that have the same structure, but reside on different servers and/or have different schema qualifiers. Uploading a second copy of a report model and pointing...

Clickthrough reports are the special kind of drillthrough reports created by Report Builder. They are "special" because they are linked to the parent report automatically, and are generated on the server from special template reports (or from a built...

Loading an arbitrary Report Designer report in Report Builder is not supported in SQL Server 2005. However, if you are trying to make it work for some reason, here are a few tips: - Don't use page headers or footers - Don't use rectangles or lists...

Report Builder uses a client technology called ClickOnce to download and launch the application files. This component runs outside of Internet Explorer, so it cannot leverage any credentials that may have been collected by IE to access the report server...