Designing and Developing Reports in ASP.NET 2.0 - Adding to and designing the report based on the data set

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Once you create the strongly-typed data set (as given in the previous section), your data set designer should look something like the following:

Now it is time to add a new embeddable report to our application. Go through the following steps.

Using the Solution Explorer, right click on the project and go for "Add New Item."
Within the "Add New Item" dialog box, select "Report" as the template, provide a name for your report (or SalesReport in this case) and hit "Add."

At this moment, the name of the report file will end with the extension "rdlc," which stands for "report definition language for client" (or for local mode). If you deal with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, it will have the extension "rdl" only, i.e. server mode.
At this moment, it shows you the report designer, where you design/develop the reports in very much the same fashion as you would for Crystal Reports. From the Toolbox, drag a table and drop it onto the layout. You can observe that it shows an Excel-like spread sheet with only three rows. The first row is for the header, the second is for detail (or records) and the third is for the footer.
At this point, you need to drag the columns (of the data set) from "Website Data Sources" onto each cell in the second row of the Excel-type grid. If "Website Data Sources" is not visible, you can make it visible by going to Data -> Show Data Sources
Once you drag all the columns, your screen should look something like the following:

You can add as large a number of columns to the right as the program allows by right-clicking and selecting "Insert Column to the Right."