Create a Shared Data Source with Report Designer

By: Ray Barley

Overview
We discussed the Shared Data Source in the earlier section on using the Report Wizard to create a new report.  The Data Source contains the information that Reporting Services needs to retrieve the data that we want to render on our report.  A Shared Data Source is one that can be used by any report in the same project.  In this section we will create a Shared Data Source.

Explanation
To create a Shared Data Source click on the New button in the Report Data area then select Data Source from the menu as shown below:

The Data Source Properties dialog will be displayed as shown below:

The first thing to do is to provide a name; enter AdventureWorksLT in the Name textbox.  Since we already defined a Shared Data Source in the earlier section on using the Report Wizard to create a new report, click the Use shared data source reference radio button and select AdventureWorksLT from the dropdown list.  The Data Source Properties dialog is shown below:

At this point we are done.  If you need to create a new Shared Data Source, you would click the New button and complete the Shared Data Source Properties dialog.  This is essentially the same thing we did back in the Report Wizard section of the tutorial.

We can now see our Shared Data Source in the Report Data area as shown below:

We are now ready to continue on to the next section and create a Data Set.