We love SSRS and Microsoft reporting. It's not as robust as Crystal, but it's the coming thing... and if you own SQL Server, it's free.
This article will be a guide to getting an RDLC report up and running as quick as possible. We'll also cover how to deploy it... that's not as straight forward as you'd think.
This only works on a machine that has SQL Server installed.
Open Visual Studio, create a Reports Application project
A wizard starts up automatically. When the wizard completes there will be a form with a report viewer control and code to automatically view the report. There will be an RDLC report and all the data access objects will be created.
In the form below, choose Database and click next.
Choose dataset and click next
Choose New Connection and follow the wizard to create the connection. Once created you'll come back to this form.
Click Next
STOP!
This next screen is a killer. It will take several minutes for the next screen to populate. When it does, DO NOT check any of the check boxes, if you do it will immediately try to put all the 25,000 stored procedures in your project. Don't ask how I know that.
Carefully expand the Stored procedures node and then click on the stored procedure that you're going to use for the report.
Then click Finish.
The next window will fully populate the way you see it below. Click Next.
Choose which fields to group by and which fields will be in the detail. Don't use the Column groups area unless you're very sure what you're doing. Here, we never do. More on that soap box later.
Just take the default layout. You can play with the different options later.
Same here.
Done. You'll end up with two objects, the form with the report viewer control, and the report. The form has code in it to run the report.
Press F5 and run the report.
In the next article we'll talk about what you need to do to get this report to run on a workstation that does not have SQL installed on it.
