Using Report Designer

Summary

In this chapter, we covered a big chunk of the BIDS IDE and the tools you’ll use to build a reporting solution. You learned that each report consists of defined elements that are based on a defined schema in the RDL, which gives SSRS the advantage of standardization. We covered the report objects that make up reports and viewed their properties and functionality. You also saw for each object how the graphical design components are directly translated to RDL through the design process. Now that you’re more comfortable with the design environment, you’ll learn how to use it to design and deploy some real reports. In the next chapter, we’ll show how to take a step-by-step approach to adding these report items to a report that was designed as part of an SSRS migration for our health-care application.