I use SQL Server 2008 R2 and I'm looking for a good reporting tool. I like what I see with Reporting Services for most column based reports, but can it also be used to create special printed forms, such as a check or an employee W2 form?
These type of forms are not column based, so I'm thinking I'd have to use a single row and column and put all the fields within it. However, I don't see a way to align some text left and some right or to put fields in a fixed position. If I can't do that then it's not possible.
I'm doing ASP.NET web programming here, so I think the right answer is to use something else to generate a PDF instead for these special types of forms, but I want to make sure there isn't a way to use Reporting Services.
Short answer is most reports are table based with fixed rows and columns. To get the appearance you want with say a W2 form is almost impossible. It would have to done via a combination of objects within the report. For instance here is a sample of a report I do for an expense report system:
I use a combination of tables, matrices, and lists just to make one report whose result looks like this:
Its very difficult to get it exactly the way you want, you have to play with reporting services to get it close to the way you want. I will not knock reporting services, it is an AWESOME tool, I love using it and it is my preferred choice (over CR crystal reports or any other 3rd party solution). But something as custom as a w2 you may have to generate on the fly and print to pdf. Kind of like what turbo tax does. Good luck!
SSRS custom formatting for these types of forms is rudimentary and difficult at best. That is if you want more that a glorified spreadsheet look. the 'report wizard in Visual Studio will get you part way however most will have to be trial and error.
Cognos ReportNet is a far superior tool however you have to work with what you are given.
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I have data on a MSSQL Server database and have to develop a service that should produce daily reports mostly in pdf format. Mobile and web could be introduced in the future, but are not required now.
There isn't any analytics to implement, just text and numbers that are sums, reached thresholds, warnings and so on. The business logic is in my application / database.
The rest of the report are list of files in a table with names, metadata list and so on.
My feeling is that SSRS is the right tool for me, despite of old style graphic components and tedious RDL definitions :-(
Power BI examples I saw, are really oriented to beautiful charts and but I have a lot of text filled with some number.
The article SSRS vs. Power BI - when to use and why? doesn't clarify enough my scenario.
So before starting the project I'm trying to check if the same things are possible in Power BI in order to use new graphical effects and not closing the door for a future analytics on data.
Any suggestion about the right tech/tool to use for my purpose?
If you want to use Power BI for that, you will need paginated reports to be able to produce reports with multiple pages. The "normal" reports are more suitable to be seen in a browser, to be interactive. However paginated reports a Premium only feature, so it will be an expensive solution. So it looks like SSRS is the right choice in your case.
I am currently evaluating reporting solutions for use within my organization and one of the requirements of the solution must be 'ad hoc reporting' and is defined as 'given an existing report the user will be permitted to modify the data points of the report and, additionally, save the report for later viewing'.
I worked through a basic report using SSAS and SSRS; this certainly worked but I found it to be a little bit to involved with needing to open report builder, specify the cube that should be used, and so on not to mention that the Report Builder (SSRS2K5) is pretty vanilla. The people that will be looking at these reports are certainly not technical people and my concern is that this process will be completely overwhelming. I did find this component and it is much more user friendly since the data source can be set dynamically at runtime and all the user has to focus on is what data they want to see.
Does SSAS/SSRS offer any other methods for ad hoc reporting other than using Report Builder to connect to cubes and going from there? Does anyone know of, or used, any products similar to Active Analysis that they might recommend? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Excel 2007 and 2010 actually has connection ability to adhoc query and analyze data from an SSAS cube. Excel have a host of features that allows interaction with the cube including using pivot tables and data mining plugins to analyze the data.
simple example here:
http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertutorial/2016/using-excel-and-creating-a-pivot-table-report/
SSRS2012 Power View in Sharepoint mode (soon in Excel) - overview is here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/3726.power-view-overview-en-us.aspx
Not quite sure what is meant by "user can modify the data points of the report" but with Excel 2007 / 2010 you can use the What If Analysis feature to modify the data in a pivot table. You can also combine that with Analysis Services writeback feature to enable some pretty cool data modelling functionality.
If you're looking for what I call "exploratory analysis" (i.e. you don't know what you're looking for in the analysis) then a product like our ActiveAnalysis component, PowerPivot, or Tableau are all good tools (note that a key difference being that our ActiveAnalysis is a developer component that you can cheaply embed into applications, and the other two are strictly end user tools).
However, if you have users who want to be able to create an "operational report" or they might want to customize existing reports those are probably not ideal tools. We actually created ActiveReports Server specifically for this type of scenario. It is a drag & drop business-user-friendly ad-hoc reporting tool that sounds like it might be more appropriate for the "not technical people" that it sounds like you're dealing with. It does not depend on SSAS and works all inside of a web browser, so nothing to deploy.
Scott Willeke
Product Manager | ActiveReports Server
GrapeCity
How would one go about localizing SSRS reports?
Let´s say I have a report that contains a label with the text "Total Sales" (in Norwegian language, which is where I come from) and I want to use the same report for our danish and swedish customers, so the actual text needs to change slightly.
Do I need to make copies of all the reports and localize them manually, or is there any way to do this in a more automated way?
Could I for instance use expressions for those texts instead, and add our own localizing system to the reports, ie. use the following expression:
=Translate("Total Sales")
which would call one of our .NET methods which would do the translation?
We´re in the beginning of using SSRS reports, so if there is a difference between 2005 and 2008 in this regard, please say which version you´re referring to, as we haven´t decided which one(s) to support yet.
Using your expressions requires you to register first the custom assembly for the report server.
This has not changed from 2005 to 2008.
A guide how this can be done is located over here
So, after completing all the steps you will be able to translate the stuff you need.
I'm a beginner at this.
I'm using mysql connector .net to connect vb.net with mysql database.
But I used ODBC for a crystal report. Is that ok?
alt text http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6863746/pics/cr1.png
And I'm also putting a command, will something like the one below work?
alt text http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6863746/pics/cr2.png
And how do I designed a crystal report?
My first try, I got a lame report with only text on it.
Please give links that could help a beginner like me to get the hang on using crystal reports. I'm using vs 2008
I think using a Crystal Reports Client for building reports is in many ways different than using Crystal in Visual Studio.
First I would definetely try to learn how to build Crystal Reports in client application. Which is more focused on "building" reports.
You can find many white papers here: http://www.crystalreports.com/whitepapers/brochures-whitepapers.asp
In terms of Visual Studio, first you need to gain a good understanding about the Crystal merge modules and especially about how to deply them properly.
There are a few good posts about this on stackoverflow actually. :)
If I can be of any more assistance just shout.
Sounds like you're off to a good start. Like any other software tool, the best way to learn about Crystal is to use it, make mistakes, and learn from your mistakes. Also like any other software tool, it has limitations and advantages. Here's a few things for you to try out:
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of "sections", i.e. Report Header & Footer, Group Header & Footer, Page Header & Footer, and the Details. Your base data should be in the Details section with summaries in the headers & footers. You can also suppress sections if you don't need them.
"Grouping" is the concept of grouping... your hospital patients by the doctor they are seeing. That can give you the average number of patients per doctor, for example.
Conditional formatting lets you change the colors/font settings according to changes in the data. Very convenient for highlighting inventory that is out of stock.
Graphs! There's a fair number of graphing options in there. They just don't work well in the Details section.
In time, you should learn about Subreports to display subsets of data.
(I'm using the previous version of Crystal, but I don't think any of the above is out of date)
I would like to use SQL Reporting Services 2008 to generate my reports, but I want to use my own UI for specifying the report type, columns, parameters and everything. I want to be able to take these criteria, and then kick off an asynchronous request to SSRS and have the report emailed to me. Is this possible? I don't want to go all the way down the road of researching SQL Reporting Services 2008 only to find that it doesn't do what I need it to do. Also, I will have a ton of DB partitions that the data will need to be pulled from. Some reports will need to pull data from only one of these, but other ones may actually need to span different databases. Is it possible when sending a report request to SSRS to specify what servername/database to pull the data from? Is it possible to tell it to take the data from multiple databases and combine it? Thanks.
Like Crystal Reports, ActiveReports and other report generators, SSRS has two basic elements behind each report: the SQL query and the report layout. No matter what tool you use for the SQL -- it can be inline SQL in the report or a call to a stored procedure -- it's going to be the same query. Multiple databases are fine as long as you can specify them up front.
You can have parameterized queries, so the user is prompted to input the relevant filters (customer ID, product group, date range, whatever).
Doing the report layout is similar to other tools -- you drag and drop controls like labels onto the report, and set their formatting.
SSRS does provide a lot of options for distributing the report, including email. You can embed the report in an ASP.Net web page, leave it on the report server site for users to browse to, run it in the wee hours of the morning and cache it so every user doesn't have to wait for the lengthy query to run.
It's a great tool. I think it will be worth your effort to experiment with it. I would wait on creating the customized UI until you've exhausted the possibilities inherent in the tool.
SSRS is not designed with this scenario in mind, for that matter I am not sure that any out of the box reporting solution is going to have an elegant solution for this. While SSRS can do what you are asking (as well as others), it is by no means quick or easy. You seem to be looking for an advanced ad-hoc solution with dynamic sourcing of the data. I would first question the requirements and determine if the business scenario really justifies such an implementation. I would weigh custom building a solution vs your learning curve with a BI reporting solution. You may find that it is easier to just build something on your own.
I think the heterogeneous dynamic database mashup is probably going to be the most challenging part.
Depending on what your scalability requirements are, one place that has that part covered, and a report writer, is Access. (Duck! Incoming!)
I think you may be creating a rod for your own back to a certain extent as RS ships with a few interfaces for report creation.
Mind you the end product is an rdl file which is nothing but xml, so you can write them by hand if you really like.
Multiple data sources are supported, but combining them on a single control/chart/etc are not, so you'll need to configure yourself a cross database capability from one of your data-sources prior to the report request if you want to do that.