Creating a Chart with SQL 2000 Reporting Services
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Have you ever wanted to learn how to create charts from scratch using the SQL 2000 Reporting Services in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE? This article gives you the appropriate introduction.
General
A picture is worth a thousand words is not really an exaggeration. Whereas a mass of data can be overwhelming, the information conveyed by a picture can create a strong impression of the same data. Lotus 1-2-3 provided strong support for charting the data with a user friendly interface. This was quickly overtaken by the MS Excel engine, which became enormously popular not only because of its number crunching power, but also because of its excellent support for creating charts.
Crystal Reports was (and is) a constant companion for the various versions of Visual Basic. In fact, it is also strongly supported with designer tools in Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE. However, Microsoft introduced the SQL 2000 Server Reporting Services that assists in creating reports from not only data in SQL 2000 Servers, but from any ODBC, OLEDB, SqlXmlOleDb sources. This opens up the possibility of making Web-based/hardcopy reporting with strong security features inherent in the .NET Framework a reality.
We need to watch how Crystal Report reacts to this new challenge. SQL 2000 Server Reporting Services also provides excellent support for creating charts, by means of a Chart Control in its Reporting Items in the toolbox. The chart control is a third party tool; the Dundas Chart control is a small sized, highly scalable, very efficient charting software that happily lives in the .NET Framework.
This "How to" article mostly covers creating charts starting from scratch using the SQL 2000 Reporting Services in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE. There are excellent sources of information on the RS both at Microsoft and elsewhere. More packages and addins are expected from Microsoft supporting the RS. Topics covered in this article include the following:
- Choosing Data for the Chart
- Creating a Data Source
- Creating a Report Project in Visual Studio .NET IDE
- Adding a Data Connection
- Configuring the DataSet
- Configuring the Layout
- Adding a Chart for Data Display
- Configuring Chart Axes and Customizing
- Summary and Conclusions
Next: Choosing Data for the Chart >>
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