Designing and Developing Reports in ASP.NET 2.0 - Creating a strongly-typed data set (Page 2 of 5 ) To design a report (locally) and embed it within our application, we first need to start with a strongly-typed data set. This data set will act as a data source for the report we are going to develop. At run-time, the data set gets automatically populated from the database (based on the table adapter) and the same data is served to the report, which finally is rendered using the "ReportViewer" control (with a mediating "ObjectDataSource"). Let us start with a step-by-step approach. - Open your Visual Studio 2005 IDE.
- Go to File -> New Web Site.
- In the "New Web Site" dialog box, select "ASP.NET web site" as the template, "File System" as the location, provide your own name (or SampleReport1) for your web site and finally click on "OK."
- Right click on the solution and go for "Add New Item."
- Within the "Add new item" dialog box, select "dataset" as the template and provide "SalesData.xsd" as the file name to create the data set. Finally, click on "add."
- It prompts you to place the dataset-related code in the "app_code" folder, to which you simply respond by clicking on "OK."
- Once it creates the dataset, it starts the "TableAdapter Configuration Wizard." You can select any existing connection or create a new connection by hitting the "New Connection" button.
- Once you have selected the connection, click on "Next." At this level, it prompts for the connection string; simply press "Next" (to store the connection string in the web.config).
- The next section asks for the command type, to which you select "Use SQL statements" and click "Next."
If you wanted to execute any stored procedures to generate the report, you need to make the appropriate selection. - Next, you can type your own SELECT statement to retrieve the data related to the report. You can also use the "Query Builder" button if you need to design a query in a GUI environment.
- Click "Next," make sure that you select both check boxes, then hit "Next" again.
- At this point, it gives you the results of your data set creation; check them and finally click "Finish."
Next: Adding to and designing the report based on the data set >>
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