Course: SSRS 2014 Advanced

In this course you’ll get a high-level view of the parts and pieces of Reporting Services so that you know what you’re working with. I’ll start by looking at the two modes you can install and operate a report server in. Then I’ll show you some of the extensive configuration options you can use to fine tune reporting features. Reporting Services has a fairly complex architecture, and I’ll walk you through a high-level view of it. There are a lot of parts and you need to have a good feel for how they all work. Then I’ll take a look at the tools available for building reports, and will walk through creating a simple report using Report Designer. Next you’ll get a solid introduction to Report Builder, and learn how to install either the standalone version or the ClickOnce version accessible from Report Manager. I’ll walk you through a tour of the Report Builder user interface. Then I’ll show you how to build a simple report, point out more of Report Builder’s features and learn about preview performance. Finally, you’ll learn about shared datasets as a way to make data access easier for end users.

In this course you’ll get a high-level view of the parts and pieces of Reporting Services so that you know what you’re working with. I’ll start by looking at the two modes you can install and operate a report server in. Then I’ll show you some of the extensive configuration options you can use to fine tune reporting features. Reporting Services has a fairly complex architecture, and I’ll walk you through a high-level view of it. There are a lot of parts and you need to have a good feel for how they all work. Then I’ll take a look at the tools available for building reports, and will walk through creating a simple report using Report Designer.

In this course you’ll get a high-level view of the parts and pieces of Reporting Services so that you know what you’re working with. I’ll start by looking at the two modes you can install and operate a report server in. Then I’ll show you some of the extensive configuration options you can use to fine tune reporting features. Reporting Services has a fairly complex architecture, and I’ll walk you through a high-level view of it. There are a lot of parts and you need to have a good feel for how they all work. Then I’ll take a look at the tools available for building reports, and will walk through creating a simple report using Report Designer. Next you’ll get a solid introduction to Report Builder, and learn how to install either the standalone version or the ClickOnce version accessible from Report Manager. I’ll walk you through a tour of the Report Builder user interface. Then I’ll show you how to build a simple report, point out more of Report Builder’s features and learn about preview performance. Finally, you’ll learn about shared datasets as a way to make data access easier for end users.

In this course you’ll get a high-level view of the parts and pieces of Reporting Services so that you know what you’re working with. I’ll start by looking at the two modes you can install and operate a report server in. Then I’ll show you some of the extensive configuration options you can use to fine tune reporting features. Reporting Services has a fairly complex architecture, and I’ll walk you through a high-level view of it. There are a lot of parts and you need to have a good feel for how they all work. Then I’ll take a look at the tools available for building reports, and will walk through creating a simple report using Report Designer. Next you’ll get a solid introduction to Report Builder, and learn how to install either the standalone version or the ClickOnce version accessible from Report Manager. I’ll walk you through a tour of the Report Builder user interface. Then I’ll show you how to build a simple report, point out more of Report Builder’s features and learn about preview performance. Finally, you’ll learn about shared datasets as a way to make data access easier for end users.

In this course you’ll get a high-level view of the parts and pieces of Reporting Services so that you know what you’re working with. I’ll start by looking at the two modes you can install and operate a report server in. Then I’ll show you some of the extensive configuration options you can use to fine tune reporting features. Reporting Services has a fairly complex architecture, and I’ll walk you through a high-level view of it. There are a lot of parts and you need to have a good feel for how they all work. Then I’ll take a look at the tools available for building reports, and will walk through creating a simple report using Report Designer. Next you’ll get a solid introduction to Report Builder, and learn how to install either the standalone version or the ClickOnce version accessible from Report Manager. I’ll walk you through a tour of the Report Builder user interface. Then I’ll show you how to build a simple report, point out more of Report Builder’s features and learn about preview performance. Finally, you’ll learn about shared datasets as a way to make data access easier for end users.

In this course, you’ll learn about some of the issues you’re likely to face starting Report Manager and connecting to a report server. Then you’ll learn about some of the cool features from a report user’s perspective to find reports, view them, and access a report’s document map. Next you’ll learn about the My Reports folder. An admin has to enable this feature before users can use it, but then it provides a location for each user to save links to reports they use often as well as their own reports. Then the course explores the various export formats supported by Reporting Services. You’ll learn about soft and hard page-break renderers, as well as the data exchange formats that can export the raw data from a report.

There are five major APIs that you can use to program report server access, and this course will cover two of them. First, we’ll look at accessing reports using a custom URL, which is the same way Report Manager provides access, although you can use a shorthand version of the URLs for easier programming. You’ll learn the structure of the URL, and see various ways to build the URLs and some of the many options available as querystring parameters. Then you’ll learn about the ReportViewer control that is available in both Web and Windows Forms .NET applications. You’ll learn how to use the control with both server and local reports, which are reports you build directly in Visual Studio for that application.

In this course you’ll learn how to use the Report Server Web Service, and see some examples of how useful it is. You’ll learn about the two endpoints that Reporting Services exposes, the management and execution endpoints, and the differences between them. You’ll also see how to build an application using the Web services to display a list of reports and render format options, both retrieved dynamically from the report server, as well as how to execute the selected report using both a custom URL and the execution Web service. As a bonus, you’ll learn how to dynamically determine whether the selected report has required parameters and one way to supply parameters to the report.

In this course you’ll learn about reporting tools, starting with seeing how you can use Management Studio for some tasks. Management Studio is far more limited than Report Manager for report server management, but nonetheless supports some important tasks. You’ll learn the three primary kinds of tasks you’ll need to use Management Studio for, as well as how to access those features. Then you’ll explore the management features of Report Manager. You’re likely to use Management Studio occasionally for the tasks it supports, but use Report Manager every day to do things like manage files and folders, including reports, and change and manage site settings and folder and object settings.

In this course, you’ll learn how to work with the security features of Reporting Services. You’ll start by learning how to authorize users to perform actions at both the server and folder level, as well as how to use Management Studio to manage report server roles. Then you’ll learn how to enable Basic authentication, necessary to allow report access via non-IE browsers and outside the local network. It is generally a very bad practice to transmit credentials or data in the clear over any network, even a local network, so next you’ll see how you can enable and optionally require the use of SSL (really TLS, or Transport Layer Security) anytime a user or application accesses Reporting Services. Then you’ll learn about how report data security hooks into the data security features of the core database engine of SQL Server. You’ll see how to require different kinds of credential for any data source, both in SQL Server Data Tools and in Report Manager. You’ll also learn about the permissions required to access data for a report.