Agile Methodology Approach to SSRS Reporting

Danielson SamuelConsultant

Defining The Terms

Agile Methodology is an approach to project management based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a server side reporting platform with which you can create interactive, tabular, graphical, or free-form reports from relational, multidimensional, or XML-based data sources

Requirements from

Clients/Reports from legacy

Systems

Creating SSRS Reports

with Agile process

Report Template

Design

Report Design

Query Design and

Optimization

Report Testing and

QA

Data Mapping Final Reports

Delivered to Clients

Requirements Gathering and Analysis

Requirements for the reports from the users may be in the form of:

1) Converting existing reports to SSRS server side reporting.2) Creating brand new reports to improve business processes.

Basic requirements that needs to be collected can consists of3) What should the report title or name be?4) Where to collect the data(Databases, tables, stored procedures etc.)5) What parameters or filters are needed?6) How the report should be rendered? HTML, PDF, Excel, …etc? This is vary important

because it determines the sizing. 7) How do you envision end users will run the reports? The web? In an application? 8) When do you need this report?

Designing Reports

• Add report parameters to allow a user to change the report data. Report parameters that are linked to query parameters on the dataset properties can reduce the amount of data retrieved from a data source. If you supply default parameters for each report parameter, the report runs automatically on first use. You can also provide a list of valid values for a parameter, so the user can choose from values that are known to exist on the data source.

• Generalize a query by adding query parameters. The syntax for queries that include variables depends on the type of data source you connect to.

• Organize report pages to provide answers to specific questions at a glance. • Add interactive sort buttons to data region columns. • Add a date stamp and report name to the report.• Use visibility options to hide complexity, but allow a user to drill down into areas of

interest• Provide a document map or a customized internal links table for a report for each of

navigation. • Align chart groups with table groups to provide a way to visualize tabular data. • Provide conditional color or images to highlight data values.

Report Builder is a report authoring environment for business users who prefer to work in the Microsoft Office environment. You work with one report at a time. You can modify a published report directly from a report server. You can quickly build a report by adding items from the Report Part Gallery provided by report designers from your organization

Developing Reports

Report Designer in Business Intelligence Development Studio is a report authoring environment that is hosted in Microsoft Visual Studio. Use Report Designer project and solution files to organize and maintain a master copy of report definitions, report parts, shared data sources, shared datasets, and resource files such as images and ESRI shapefiles for maps.

Expressions are used frequently in reports to control content and report appearance. Expressions are written in Microsoft Visual Basic, and can use built-in functions, custom code, report and group variables, and user-defined variables. Expressions begin with an equal sign (=).

Templates serve as a ready to use baseline to develop SSIS Package or SSRS report from so that the reports would all have the same appearance to your customers, and the packages would all be set up with the proper servers and configurations.

In order to create templates, copy the Reports rdlx files to the following directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject. The same notes apply for 32/64 bit, installed drive, and SQL version.

Deploying Reports

Report Properties:In SQL Server Data

Tools (SSDT), you must specify the report server and optionally the folders for reports and shared data sources so that you can publish the items in a Report Server project to a report server. The properties and values that SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) needs to build, preview an deploy reports are stored in project configurations of the Report Server project

Reporting Services Configuration Manager is used to configure a Reporting Services Native Mode installationLocal or remote report server instance can be configured with Report Services Configuration Manager.

Role Assignments:Predefined role describes a collection of related tasks. You can assign groups and user accounts to predefined roles to provide immediate access to report server operations.• Item-level roles provide varying levels

of access to report server items and operations that affect those items. Item-level roles are defined on the root node (Home) and all items throughout the report server folder hierarchy.

• System-level roles authorize access at the site level. Item and system-level roles are mutually exclusive but are used together to provide comprehensive permissions to report server content and operations.

Variety of viewing formats can be selected, reports can be exported to other applications such as Microsoft Excel, and users can subscribe to published reports. The reports that you create can be viewed over a Web-based connection or as part of a Microsoft Windows application or SharePoint site. You can also create data alerts on reports published to a SharePoint site and receive email messages when report data changes.

Testing Reports

Testing is important through out the lifecycle of SSRS report development.

1. Verify the report runs with a broad variety of parameter values and in whatever way the users will be receiving the report. For example that a subscription runs and deploys the report as desired.

2. Verify that the expected data is returned.

3. Verify that the performance of the report is within an acceptable range

For More Informationhttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159267(v=sql.105).aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159253(v=sql.105).aspx

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Spackle/72869/