Reporting Services with SQL Azure : Starting a SQL Azure–Based Report

When you're creating reports that access data from SQL Azure, the process is the same as creating reports that access local data, with one slight difference: the connection to the data. These examples use SQL Server 2008 R2. It comes with Visual Studio 2008 Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), and that is what you use to create and deploy the reports. To create a report, follow these steps:

1. Open BIDS, and create a new Report Server Project. In Figure 1 the project is called AzureReports, but feel free to change the name. Click OK.

   NOTE

   All the projects throughout this book have used Visual Studio 2010, which uses the .NET Framework 4.0. But because SQL Server 2008 R2 ships with Visual Studio 2008 BIDS, this example uses version 3.5 of the .NET Framework. So, don't be confused by what you see in this chapter's figures versus what you see in other chapters.

   Figure 1. New Report Server Project

   

2. In Solution Explorer, right-click the solution, and select Add → New Item from the context menu.

3. In the Add New Item dialog, select the Report template, and name this report Documents, as shown in Figure 2. Click OK.

   Figure 2. Adding a report

   

At this point, you're staring at a blank report, but you also see a new Report Data tab displayed in the Visual Studio IDE. Your task is to tell the report where to get its data from, and SQL Server 2008 R2 makes it very easy. Prior to SQL Server 2008 R2, you had a couple of data providers to choose from: ADO.NET (SqlClient) and OLE DB. However, R2 added a new SQL Azure–specific provider. You see this shortly.