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Chapter 17: Reporting for Duty, Sir! A Look At Reporting Services
If you ponder Figure 17-7 for a moment, you’ll notice that there is a bit more to our Report Model project
than just data sources; indeed, we now need to take the next step and create a Data Source view.
Data Source Views
A Data Source view has a slight similarity to the views we learned about in Chapter 10. In particular, it
can be used to provide users access to data, but can filter what data they actually see. If we give them
access to the entire data source, then they are able to see all data available to that data source. Data Source
views allow us to filter the data source down to just a subset of its original list of available objects.
To add our Data Source view, simply right-click Data Source View and select Add New Data Source
View (tricky, isn’t it?), as shown in Figure 17-8.
Figure 17-8
We get another of those silly “Welcome to the Wizard” dialogs, so just click Next and you’ll arrive at a
dialog that you’ve essentially already seen before — one that is basically identical (only one or two very
subtle cosmetic differences) to one we had partway through creating our data source — Figure 17-5.
Accept the default, and then click through to the Select Tables and Views dialog shown in Figure 17-9.
This one, as the name suggests, allows us to specify which tables and views are going to be available to
end users of the Report Model we’re building.
Start by selecting SalesOrderDetail and then use the > button to move that into the Selected Objects
column. Next, click the Add Related Tables button and see what happens. SQL Server will use the rules that
it knows about the relationships between the tables (based on defined foreign keys) to figure out what tables
are related to the one or more tables we had already selected. In this case, it chose SalesOrderHeader
(the parent of our SalesOrderDetail table) and SpecialOfferProduct (to which SalesOrderDetail
also has a foreign key). For the report we’ll be building, we don’t need the SpecialOfferProduct table,
so remove that by selecting that table and using the < button. Finally, add the Customer, Person and
Product tables to finish catching up with the tables I have selected in Figure 17-9.
Don’t worry about the Filter or “Show system objects” options in this table; both are pretty harmless.
The short rendition is that the filter just filters down the object list to make it easy to deal with databases
that have a very large number of objects to show. The “Show system objects” option is just that —
it allows you to include system objects in the Report Model (which seems pretty silly to me for the vast,
vast majority of applications out there).
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