Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 17
Configuring Reports with SSRS
In particular, all these templates and tutorials let students simply insert text and images, such
as dragging and dropping information into a lab report outline, so students can now spend
their time concentrating on the content instead of the form.
—Kathy Schrock
A BI solution extracts information out of data, and reports are the standard mechanism for displaying this
information. As we saw in Chapter 16, creating a basic SSRS report is easy. But, creating a good SSRS report takes
strategy.
Fortunately, Microsoft has given us a number of valuable features within SSRS that can help us create good
and professional reports. In this chapter, we review a number of design features and see how they are used to
congure your reports.
Creating a Report Template
A long tradition of distrust is centered around reports. This is mainly because reports on the same data can
often come up with different information. There are two things that have proven effective in resolving this issue;
designate a team dedicated to reporting, and provide a place for users to access official reports.
This does not necessarily mean that employees cannot ever make their own ad hoc reports from within their
company; it simply means they have official reports at their disposal that have been well developed, tested, and
validated. When done correctly, employees learn to respect your reporting solution as a legitimate and reliable
source of information.
Standardization can provide some added legitimacy. And although standardization can be quite an
elaborate endeavor , some very simple techniques exist that can help. Perhaps one of the simplest and most
useful techniques is to create a report template. A report template sets the location of common elements that
each report requires.
A basic report structure has three elements: the header, the body, and the footer. The header and footer are
strictly defined in a report template, because they include the least dynamic parts of a report such as simple text,
images, and company standards. For example, it is expected that most reports will have a title, a byline, and a
creation date. And if the report contains more than a single page of data, it will have page numbers.
The body, however, can be loosely defined, because it contains dynamic content such as a results table or a
series of charts. See the example in Figure
17-1
.
