Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 17: Reporting for Duty, Sir! A Look At Reporting Services
One could spend an entire chapter just going over the nuances of each entity of the model and all the
attributes within it. Take particular note of how SQL Server automatically breaks down well understood
attributes (such as dates) to smaller attributes (say, month, day, and year) based on well understood
common uses of the underlying data type.
As it happens, we probably do want this field hidden, but you often see instances where something like
the Sales Order ID, although system generated, would be the order number a customer would see on an
invoice. Many identity values are artificial, “under the covers” constructs, and thus why SQL Server
assumes you wouldn’t want to show this in the report.
Deploying Our Model
Well, building a Report Model is all well and good, but if no one can get at it, it serves little purpose
(much like designing a stored procedure, but never actually adding it to your database). To make our
report usable to end users, we must deploy it.
Fortunately deploying our model couldn’t get much easier. Indeed, the hard part is knowing that you
need to and then finding the command to do so. To deploy, simply right-click in a white space area of
the Solution Explorer (or on our actual report), or right-click the project name and choose Deploy. You
can watch the progress of the deploy in the output window of Visual Studio:
Build complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings
------ Build started: Project: ReportModelProject, Configuration: Production ------
Build complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings
------ Deploy started: Project: ReportModelProject, Configuration: Production
------
Deploying to http://localhost/ReportServer
Deploying data source ‘http://localhost/ReportServer/Data Sources/Adventure
Works2008’.
Deploying model ‘AdventureWorks2008 Report Model.smdl’.
Deploy complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
========== Deploy: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========
Report Creation
Our Report Model is, of course, not itself a report. Instead, it merely facilitates reports (and, considering
there are lots of business type people who understand reports, but not databases, facilitating reports can
be a powerful thing). Now that it is deployed, we can generate many reports from just the one model.
To see and generate reports, you need to leave the Business Intelligence Studio and actually visit the
reporting user interface — which is basically just a Website. Navigate to http:///reports — in my case, I have it right on my local system, so I can get there by navigating
to http://localhost/reports, as shown in Figure 17-20.
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