Book Image

Reporting with Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Book Image

Reporting with Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Additional components of a report


A basic report can be created from just the primary components (data source, dataset, and report items) discussed in the previous section. However, in practice, there are a few other objects used to make reports more useful and flexible for business users.

Report parameters

Parameters provide users with control over the behavior of a report at runtime. The most common use of parameters is in conjunction with a dataset to filter the results returned by the query. This can add a great deal of flexibility to reports. For example, instead of developing a separate report for each of the company's six sales territories, a single report could be created with a sales territory parameter that allows the user to choose the sales territory or subset of sales territories that they want data displayed for at runtime.

Parameter values can also be accessed in expressions (which will be discussed in the next section) allowing the user to provide input that is then used to...