Bob's SQL Reporting Services Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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?...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...