I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Over the past nine years or so, I have showcased many examples of creative report designs on my blog and various community events. Now I’d like to hear from you and see what others in the community have done. To bring even more creative report designs to the community will require your participation.
Have you created something interactive? Colorful? Dynamic? Useful? Just plain interesting? If you think you’ve come up with an innovative design or done something interesting with SSRS, please share it here. Of course, credit will be given where credit is due. It’s not all about me.
To send reports; send me an email to my first name at this root domain name and I’ll send you an upload location address.
No advertisers, please.
Working with SSRS, just wondering if anyone has sent in their Reports.
I have not done anything cool but might be working on something over the next few weeks for the insurance industry. Not sure how much of it I can share online but will email the methodology once it’s done.
Just wanted to know if anyone else is using SSRS for reporting in the Insurance Industry (UK)
Thanks,
Kwesi
Paul — has anyone submitted their reports? Just wondering if you’ll be sharing what other people have accomplished…
Thanks,
Pete
Derek,
One purpose of my blog is to promote an open discussion forum so I’ll start by saying that I respect your opinion. However, to duplicate the complexity of the reports I typically create for my clients in SSRS would be far more complicated and time-consuming in an ASP.NET web form. Your reply is not really related to my original post so I ask that any responses to this new topic by directed to a new post “SSRS or a Custom Web Form – Pros & Cons”, at: http://sqlserverbiblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/ssrs-or-a-custom-web-form-pros-cons/
I’m not really a fan of SSRS, preferring to use an ASP.NET and HTML interface with an OLEDB or ADODB connection string to a backend SQL database to present information. This way, I can use HTML/CSS to present the information in the way I want to, rather than the way SSRS wants me to. This has some obvious advantages – proper error catching, no grey parameter boxes, more comprehensive support for ‘against the flow’ INSERT/UPDATE traffic (you can use SSRS as a crude input tool), and more.
Plus, you get to use your favourite .NET language – mine’s VBScript. Yes, I’m of the old-skool ‘procedural programming’ class, not at home with OOP, and this has some disadvantages, admittedly (no event handling with VBScript!) but the possibilities are endless.
You can put a proper input form together, too, with method-based programming to sanitise inputs and perform server-side activities (like automatic e-mails, workflows) where SSRS is sadly deficient. SQL Server can handle all the sorting and even the formatting, returning ADODB.RecordSet objects in an intuitive grid form (queried using similar syntax to arrays – these are, in fact, all descended from System.Collections).
You probably get the idea by now – but just to emphasise – SSRS is the poor man’s tool for front-end web design. It’s best in my experience to do it the ‘hard way’ and get the results you want, rather than what you have to settle for.