What is report life cycle?
The report life cycle is the sequence of activities associated with a report from creation to delivery. Reporting Services fully supports the three phases of the report life cycle, which include report development, management of the report server, and report access by users.
What is report development?
You develop reports on your own computer by selecting data for the report, organizing the report layout, and enhancing the report with formatting and, optionally, interactive features. At any time during report development, you can preview the report to test its appearance and any interactive features you added. If you’re building a managed report, you can deploy the report from the authoring tool to the report server or to a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web site. If you’re building an ad hoc report instead, you can choose to store it on your computer, but you also have the option to deploy it to the report server or a SharePoint site.
What is Report Administration?
Administrators manage the technical environment for the reporting platform. Before reports can be deployed to the report server and accessed by users, an administrator must configure the report server and optionally integrate the report server with SharePoint. Occasionally, an administrator might reconfigure the report server to fine tune its performance. Administrators also manage the location, security, and execution properties of reports, although you might also delegate these responsibilities to some power users. Report developers can deploy reports directly to the report server if given permission to do so, or they can provide reports to an administrator to upload directly to the report server or to deploy in batch using a script utility. After a report is deployed to the report server, as an administrator, you can place the report in a folder with other related reports. You can then apply security to the report or the folder containing the report to control who can view the report and who can modify report properties.
How do we access the reports?
The most common way for users to access reports is to use a browser and navigate to a central report repository. As another alternative, you can create your own portal application with links to guide users to reports in Reporting Services. A user can also optionally store a selection of reports in a personal folder for easy access or can create a subscription to a report to receive it on a scheduled basis in an e-mail inbox, a network file share, or a SharePoint document library. By default, you view a report rendered in HTML format, but you can instead render it to a PDF or Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) format to share your report in printed form or to Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Extensible Markup Language (XML) format to import the report data into other applications. You can also request a specific format for subscription delivery of reports. Another way that you might access Reporting Services reports is through corporate applications. Reports might be embedded into applications developed by your organization or by third-party vendors
What consists of the data tier in SSRS?
The data tier in the Reporting Services architecture consists of a pair of databases to support the reporting platform. The ReportServer database is the primary database for permanent storage of reports, report models, and other data related to the management of the report server. The ReportServerTempDB database stores session cache information and cached instances of reports for improved report delivery performance. In a scale-out deployment of Reporting Services across multiple report servers, these two databases in the data tier are the only requirements. These databases do not need to be on the same server as the report server.
What is a Report Manager?
To view a report on a server running in native mode, you use a Web application called Report Manager to locate and render the desired report for online viewing. You can page through a large report, search for text within a report, zoom in or out to resize a report, render a report to a new format, print the report, and change report parameters using a special toolbar provided in the report viewer.
Report Viewers
Reporting Services provides three ways to view reports: Report Manager, SharePoint, or a programmatic interface. Within a single instance of Reporting Services, you can use either Report Manager or SharePoint as a standard user interface, but you cannot use both tools in the same instance. Whether Reporting Services runs in native mode or SharePoint mode, you can use a programmatic interface in addition to or instead of the standard user interface.
How does Sharepoint report viewer work?
In SharePoint Integrated mode, you can navigate to a SharePoint document library to locate and render a report much as you can when using Report Manager. A Web Part is also available for embedding a report into a SharePoint Web page, such as a Whether you open the report in a document library or in a Web Part, the same capabilities to page, search, zoom, render, print, and select parameters available in Report Manager are available in SharePoint.
How does programmatic report view work?
You can integrate report viewer functionality into a custom application by using the Reporting Services API or by accessing reports using URL endpoints. You can also extend standard functionality by customizing security, data processing, rendering, or delivery options.
What are the processor components of a report server?
Activity on the report server is managed by two processor components: the Report Processor and the Scheduling and Delivery Processor. The Report Processor receives all requests that require execution and rendering of reports. The Scheduling and Delivery Processor receives all requests for scheduled events such as snapshots and subscriptions.
What is a Server Tier in Reporting Services?
The server tier is the central layer of the Reporting Services architecture. Within this tier lie the processor components that respond to and process requests to the report server. These components delegate certain functions to subcomponents called server extensions, which are simply processors that perform very specific functions. These components are implemented as a Windows service.
What are the Server Extensions in reporting services?
The server extensions in Reporting Services are the processor components that perform very specific tasks. This modular approach within the server tier allows you to disable an out-of-the- box extension or add your own extension, whether developed in-house or by a third party. Reporting Services includes five types of server extensions: authentication, data processing, report processing, rendering, and delivery.
What are the differences between shared and embedded data sources?
An embedded data source is report-specific. The description of a data source connection is embedded in the report definition. Embedded data source connection information can be used only by the report in which it is embedded. The connection information is internal to the report or subscription (for example, if you view the XML syntax of the report, you can see the connection information in the XML)
A shared data source is a separate item stored on the report server that describes a data source connection. It is reusable across multiple reports and subscriptions. Shared data sources are required by report models and optional for reports and data-driven subscriptions.
You can create and manage shared data sources separately from the reports and data-driven subscriptions that use it. You can move a shared data source to different folder locations, name a shared data source, and set security on it to determine its availability.
What are drill through and drill down reports?
Drill through reports are reports that have links which when clicked will navigate to a location with detailed information about the link clicked. Drilled Down reports are type of reports that give grouped view of the report initially and the user have the option to expand the grouped view to get to detail view of each grouping.
parameterized reports, multivalued parameterized reports,cascaded parameterized reports
Drill down Reports (grouping, visiblity),Drill through reports (report navigation,url , bookmark)
—— Data Regions = subreports, chart, map, List
Tabular Matrix/ Matrix / Tabular/ Tablix Reports / Matrix Data Regions/ Chart Data Region
——–Formatting Stuff—–Data bars,indicators,rectangles,lines,gauges
Conditional formatting (through expressions and using inbuilt functions)
images in report, Interactive Sorting, Document Map, Deployment
Report Models are .SMDL files(semantic model definition language)
Report builder
.SMDL files–> adhoc reports (.rdf files)
if you are controlling the report in report server, they are .rdl files
If you are controlling your reports on a client application, they are changed to rdlc fields.
Report Builder 3.0 can be used as a report designer to create managed reports and adhoc reports as well.
Report builder 1.0 would support only adhoc reports.
When you are working with OLAP cubes we need to remember that we cannot generate a report model from an OLAP cube in BIDs/Report Model Progject.
We can generate report models for cubes at the report manager level.
Add a cube data source explicitly to the report manager and then generate a report model from that cube. Then you can generate adhoc reports using that model in Report builder.Report snapshot is stored in report server database.
Cache report is stored in reportservertempdb.You limit the snapshot to make sure the report does not fill the database if it’s scheduled to run continuously.Linked report of any report is like a desktop short cut of an application
Generating models from OLAP cubes
Linked Reports
Security in SSRS is assigned through a set of roles which has a set of tasks assigned to each role.
Security can be provided at two levels; System Level Security (System Administrator)& Item level security(Browser, Content Manager, My Report, Publisher, Report Builder)
Browser:- Can view reports, folders and subscribe to reports
Content Manager:-May manage content in the report server. This includes folders, reports and resources.
My Reports:- May publish reports and linked reports, manage folders, reports and resources in a users my report folder.
Publisher – may publish reports and linked reports to the report server
Report builder – may view report definitions in report builder
Rendering Format: PDF, XML, CSV, Word, MHTML
Reports can be delivered to different subscribers / users either to their emails or a windows file share in different rendering formats by using subscriptions in SSRS.
Subscriptions
Standard Subscription:- The recipient information is available and all users will receive a single rendering format of a report either in email or windows file share.
Data Driven Subscription
The recipient information is not readily available. The recipient information would be in the underlying database and we can deliver multiple reports in multiple rendering formats to various users.
Report Delivery(Push and Pull Methods)
In pull delivery, the report is deployed to the centralized report server and users access the reports on demand.
rsreportserver.config . it’s an xml file which has all the configuration details of your reporting services.
