Creating your own report templates when using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Service

 

When you’re creating a reporting service solution for your organization, the first thing you would decide before going any further with the report design is the finalization of a report template.

A standard template does add professional look to reports that are developed and deployed all across the organization.

How far have we gone and thought about creating a report template with reporting service, that can be used by all the report designers in your organization?

Have you even imagined the amount of consistency, professionalism and time / cost savings that it brings in?

If you have not thought about that, here is the article that will help you in achieving all that it talked above.

A report template is nothing more than a partially completed report (RDL) file. You can add your own report templates to the BIDS report project template items folder.

The default installation path for this folder is (For reporting Service 2008 / R2) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject.

Ok. Here is how you can create a report template.

1. Open a new Report Server project in your Business Intelligence Development Studio.

2. From the solution explorer, reports folder, Right click and choose Add –> New Item. Select report under the Visual studio installed templates and rename it as per your convenience.

3. Just design the report as any normal report, but without any dataset and data items. You can add the report header / report footer, Page header / Page footer, Your logo, Some image / color background for the report, common globals like Page numbers/ total pages, lines etc.

4. Save the report.

5. Now copy the above created RDL file and paste it in the Visual studio project items folder,

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject.

Now, how to use the created report template in your project?

It is as simple as that. All you need to do is, Add a new item in a similar way (From the solution explorer, reports folder, Right click and choose Add –> New Item. )

You’ll see the newly added template under the Visual studio installed templates. Just select that with your own report name. It’ll create a copy of the template and put the report in your project solution.

Happy reporting!

HTH!

Selva.

[All the posts are AS-IS and doesn’t carry any warranty]