Hi all,
Recently during an engagement with a IT partner, we had this requirement being thrown to us and we were told that it would be difficult to achieve this with the existing technology. With further research, I found that this topic has actually been broached countless times and is evident in blogs such as:
However sometimes based on the steps which are documented above it is difficult to visualize what exactly needs to be done. Secondly most reports needs to be generated based on parameters, how do we take in the input parameters and apply that filter on the sharepoint list data. This was not covered in detail in the posts. What about the steps to deploy and use the report viewer web part?
Contrary to what I was told, I think doing a report in SSRS based on MOSS list data is actually not as difficult as it looks and can be easily achieved. I hope to share this information to the community and have come out with a video to illustrate the process of creating a very simple report drawing data from a SharePoint List from start all the way to deployment and showing it in the MOSS report viewer webpart (thanks tok for helping me upload the files), you can access the videos at http://community.sgdotnet.org/files/folders/qoodonky/default.aspx. As the video illustrates, you can easily achieve the requirement in a little more than 10 minutes. Note that this might not be the most optimized way to create a report as it was done in short notice.
The details of the steps can be taken from any of the 3 external links above but the summarized steps are as such
(1) Create the data source to point to (this will be pointing to the SharePoint List webservice)
(2) Create the dataset
(3) Configure your reports
(4) Add in report parameters and apply filter based on the report parameters passed in
(5) Deploy the report
(6) Configure the report viewer web part in MOSS and you are done!