SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS): Part 3 - Create Report without Wizard

Introduction

In this article we are going to see how to create a report without using the wizard that was used in the first article. The idea behind this article is that we will have full control over the creation of report and we can customize it at any level as per our requirement.

You can follow through my article at the below url.

Steps

Let's open BIDS and create a project under Report Server Project as shown in the image shown below:

Now right click on the report on the right hand side and select Add New item à Report as shown in the screen below:

Now you will see the report designer window as shown in the screen below.

Here we have 3 tabs as Data, Layout and Preview. The Data tab is used to select what data to show in the report. Clicking on the Datasetà New Dataset as shown in the screen below will help us to select the data source.

Now we can write our own query to fetch the details which we can show in the reports as shown in the screen below:

Now we can shift to the next tab which is the Layout tab, where we are going to design the report based on our requirements. Drag and drop the table control from the tool box to the layout screen; then your screen should look similar to the one below:

Now go back to the Dataset tool pane, and select the columns that should appear in which part of the report as shown in the screen below:

We can change the properties of the table report structure by pressing F4 which will open the properties tab. You can see the screen below for the different options available to format or customize your report.

Now press F5 to run the application. It will ask for the Login credentials as shown below. Once we give the credentials it will fetch the report.

Without running the project itself we can check the result by clicking on the 3^rd tab in the project which is nothing but the Preview tab as shown in the screen below:

Conclusion

In this article we have seen on how to create a report in BIDS without using the Wizard and how to customize the report based on our requirement.