Bob's SQL Reporting Services Blog

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...

...and one of my esteemed colleagues, to boot. :) http://blogs.msdn.com/chrisbal/

There are two ways to get the generated SQL for a Report Builder report (or for a model-based query in any RS report): 1) use SQL Profiler to capture the incoming SQL commands, or 2) enable query logging in the report server. To enable query logging...

Many people are interested in creating subscriptions to Report Builder reports. In SQL Server 2005 this is only possible if the reports can be run unattended by the server . If the report has any user-dependent behavior, then it can only be run live by...

While not a documented feature, you actually can enter an arbitrary RDL expression into a textbox in a Report Builder report. For example, you could add a textbox that shows the date the report was run by setting the value of the textbox to the following...

Several customers have asked how to restrict data visibility in a report model for a hosted application, where every table has a "CompanyID" column, and every user that accesses the system is associated (via some other table) with exactly one company...

Often a many-to-many relationship exists between two entities where the intermediate entity has nothing on it except the connecting roles. For example, it might be that an Employee can be assigned to many Regions, and each Region can have many Employees...

I just posted the first article on my blog. Here's the abstract: The report models introduced in SQL Server 2005 feature a number of ways to customize the data visible to different users and groups: perspectives, model item security, security filters...

The SQL Server 2005 SP1 CTP is now available. This update fixes a number of Report Builder issues in the original 2005 release, including one that is fairly critical. The most critical issue is related to report processing and database collation. Model...

You easily can add basic parameters to a Report Builder report using the Filter dialog. For example, to let the user choose which year to view sales data for, add an Order Year filter condition to your report filter, then, instead of specifying a value...

To launch Report Builder, use one of the following URLs (also documented on MSDN ): http://<servername>/reportserver/reportbuilder/reportbuilder.application (Full Trust) http://<servername>/reportserver/reportbuilder/reportbuilderlocalintranet...

IT People and Report Builder The natural inclination when IT people see and start to use Report Builder is that they immediately try think of the entire experience in terms of the underlying SQL statements -- in particular the type of SQL statements they...

Relational databases are often heavily normalized to improve performance, reduce storage requirements, and ensure data consistency. While performance may be relevant to report execution, neither of these reasons is relevant when presenting the schema...

SQL 2005 report models will ship with a curious and admittedly incomplete solution for handling "the information users typically want to see about an instance of entity X". The problem is that there are many scenarios for which the answer to that question...

The top part of the Explorer pane in Report Builder is probably unlike anything most people have ever used. It starts out as a flat list of entities -- big "things" in your database like Customers, Orders, Products, etc. -- but then rearranges itself once you've added the first field to your report into an auto-collapsing, recursive tree. What's really going on here? Why the new-fangled interface?...

Here's a neat trick a co-worker and I discovered this afternoon for creating an inline bar chart (an inline data visualization in a table or other data region). 1. Add an embedded image to your report that will serve as the "bar" (a simple horizontal...