Report Authoring - SSRS
A brief overview of report authoring, including information on Report Builder, Microsoft Visual Studio, and creating stored procedures.
Report Builder
Report Builder is a report authoring environment for businesses who prefer to work in the Microsoft Office environment. Report Builder is a free download from Microsoft that can be installed on a Windows client or on the database server. For more details, read the Microsoft documentation on the MSDN library.
Microsoft Visual Studio
You can only author reports in the version of Visual Studio that supports your specific SQL Server installation. In fact, when you install SQL Server, you get an install of Visual Studio along with that. So, SQL 2008 installs a shell of VS 2005; SQL2008R2 installs a shell of Visual Studio 2008; SQL 2012 installs a shell of VS 2010; and SQL 2014 installs a shell of VS 2012. In general, the SQL version is one revision ahead of the VS version you use, and the version of VS you get is specifically limited to report authoring. If you have a full compatible version of Visual Studio, you can use your own copy, but it's usually a good thing to use the version of VS that comes with SQL.
Create Stored Procedures
A stored procedure, also known as sproc or SP, is prepared SQL code that you can reuse over and over again. You can pass parameters to a stored procedure, so it can act based on those values.
- The Domain GUID is in the System Setup, and your User GUID is in your account. In general, we make these parameters for the stored procedure underlying the report so you can use it to check security, restrictions, limit data, and so on. The Page ID is the actual numerical ID of the page you launch.
- The Platform passes the parameters to the stored procedure. You only need to declare the stored procedures. When creating your own stored procedures, assign a prefix to easily identify custom stored procedures from those that MinistryPlatform provides.
- @DomainID varchar(40)
- @UserID varchar(40)
- @PageID INT