Basic Report Design - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 98

Line Report Item
Lines may be drawn in any direction and may be set to a variety of styles and colors, as displayed in Figure
4-34. The properties for a line are simple and mostly set using the Properties window or designer toolbar.
Figure 4-34
Some clever techniques are used to render lines in HTML. Reporting Services will typically try to render
content using the most effective way possible. For example, when outputting standard HTML, lines may
be rendered as table borders, as a DIV tag filled using a JavaScript function, or even using Virtual Reality
Modeling Language (VRML) commands. Like all reports, it's the job of each format rendering extension
on the report server to use the appropriate technique to build each report element output.
Rectangle Report Item
A rectangle item can have many different uses. A rectangle is simply used to visually separate a region of the
report. It may be used to visually contain other items. If items such as text boxes, grids, and so on are placed
into a rectangle, all these items can be moved together by simply moving the rectangle. A rectangle may also
be used as a data container for data items and can be related to and repeated with a parent container (see
Figure 4-35).
Image Report Item
Images can be embedded into the report, linked to an external file, or obtained from a data source.
Images can be of the BMP, GIF, JPG, JPE, PNG, or X-PNG type. Adding an image in the designer is pretty
straightforward. A critical factor is that images are sized and cropped prior to being added to a report.
You can resize the image in the Report Designer, but this will not result in a smaller file size. Use a
graphics editing tool like the Office Picture Library, Adobe PhotoShop, or Macromedia Fireworks to
resize or crop the image and then save it to a new file. You can scale and fit an image to fit the image
item container, but it's advisable to use image files that are already the correct size. This conserves disk
space, improves performance, and prevents image distortion.
Drag and drop an image item from the Toolbox onto the report. This will launch the Image Wizard dialog
(see Figure 4-36). Select the method you want to use; the image can be from a table in the database or a file
and may be linked or embedded into the report. Getting external image files to render correctly can be a
bit tricky at times due to file access permissions on the server. If in doubt, it may be easiest to either store
the image in the database or embed it into the report definition.