Create a Report using the Report Designer

By: Ray Barley

Overview

In the prior section we created a report using the Report Wizard in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).  In this section we will create a report from scratch using the Report Designer in BIDS.  With the Report Designer you start out with an empty canvas; you define every aspect of the report yourself.  The Report Designer allows you to create sophisticated reports and dashboards.

In this section we will complete the following steps in the Report Designer to build a simple report:

• Add a new report to our project
• Create a shared data source
• Create a Dataset
• Configure a Table

The following screen shot shows the report that we will build as rendered in the Report Manager:

The above report is based on the same query that we used in the earlier Report Wizard section.  The plus sign icon to the left of the value in the Parent Product Category column allows us to drilldown to the Product Category details.

Now let's continue on to the next section and begin to create our report.