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

Chapter 17: Reporting for Duty, Sir! A Look At Reporting Services
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Depending on how your report server is configured, the report may be runnable just
with what we’ve put in thus far. For most systems, however, there is likely to be a
restriction that requires you to filter your results in some manner (to avoid excessive
loads) before executing the report.
To add a filter, click on the Filter icon at the top of the Report Designer window. This brings up the Filter
Data dialog. Drag the Credit Card ID field into the main pane of the dialog. This sets us up to use the Credit
Card ID as a filter, but we still need to set the exact filter criteria. The default comparison is an equals,
which doesn’t meet our need, so click on the word equals and select the Is Empty option as shown in
Figure 17-22, then click OK.
Figure 17-22
When you have this done, click Run Report, and you’ll see the fruits of our labor, as shown in Figure 17-23.
We, do, however, have a minor problem — the report has quite a few pages (it will not show how many
for sure until we navigate to the end), and the information isn’t very useful the way it is currently sorted.
No problem! The Report Builder makes this easy as cake to deal with by simply clicking the up/down
arrows next to the columns of the report. In my case, I’m going to sort based on the person’s last name,
as shown in Figure 17-24. Notice how the report is automatically grouped where it makes sense (avoiding
repeating values).