

Suppose you build a report that both regular users and executives will view. Tip #1: Implementing Column-Level Security in Reports Is there a solution or workaround?” This reflects many scenarios that I encounter in my consulting practice. I'll present many of these tips by saying, “You want to implement functionality/behavior ABC, but you're running into a limitation. Implementing Running Aggregations in a report.Implementing a nested “Page X of Y” on a report.Dealing with page margins and blank extra pages.Repeating column headings across multiple pages.Creating cross-chart filter refresh effects.Implementing drilldown functionality with options to set initial drilldown.

Implementing column level security in reports.In the last year, I've even been writing articles as test or interview questions, and this article will also diverge in that I'm only covering the following eight items:

What's on the Menu?įor over a decade, I've been using the Baker's Dozen theme of giving you 13 tips. Several of the tips in this article reflect those exercises to demonstrate the power of the product.
#Year over yaer of grandtotal spotfire full#
One of my roles as a consultant is to show developers and managers the full power of SSRS and how experienced developers can extend it. To many, SSRS remains merely adequate, but lacks some of the power found in third-party tools, competing products, and even the quasi-reporting capabilities in Excel. Still, SSRS suffers from a bit of a perception issue. Microsoft continued to expand SSRS in SSRS 2008R2, and has given certain UI areas of the product a much-needed make-over in the upcoming SQL Server 2016 release. Although Crystal Reports still had an edge on the total number of features, SSRS 2008 became a truly viable option for internal business reporting. So instead of adding the bells and whistles, Microsoft fortified their bread and butter. Microsoft didn't try to match every single bell and whistle of Crystal Reports in SSRS 2008 instead, they expanded their existing reporting (and charting) functionality on their own terms, and greatly improved the scalability and performance of the reporting engine. I concluded that SSRS 2005 was a good but not outstanding product, and lacked functionality compared to Crystal Reports. Toward the end of that period, I took a serious look at SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 (I'll use the acronym SSRS for the rest of this article). Recently, I heard someone say, “Third-party report and charting tools might have many bells and whistles, but SQL Server Reporting Services is still the bread and butter for many developers.”įrom the late 1990s to 2007, I was a die-hard Crystal Reports fanatic and published a book on Crystal Reports development with. SQL Server Reporting Services: The Ultimate Bread and Butter of Reporting Tools In this article, I'll demonstrate some tips and reusable approaches in different areas of report authoring/generation that help make that case. Fortunately, Microsoft greatly enhanced the SSRS feature set over the last eight years (from SSRS 2008 to the present)-thereby empowering SSRS advocates to make a stronger and more compelling case that SSRS is indeed a prime-time player in the world of business reporting. Early on, many developers and technology managers viewed SSRS as an average report writer that lacked functionality and scalability compared to other established reporting solutions. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) has come a long way since the initial release of SSRS in SQL Server 2000.
