Creating a Chart with SQL 2000 Reporting Services - Creating a Report Project in Visual Studio .NET IDE
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Several different kinds of projects can be created in VS.NET 2003 IDE, and one of them is the Report project. It is the only project type in the Business Intelligence (more types would be added!) with two items, a Report and a Report Wizard. When the project is created, there will be two folders created, a Shared Data Sources folder and a reports folder. The basics of creating a report are exhaustively covered in another article; in this article, only some essentials are described.
Adding a Data Connection
For report generation, a data source is neccesary, and from the VS.NET IDE a connection has to be established to this source. This is accomplished by going to the menu item, View -->Server Explorer, and on the Data Connections node right click to add a connection from the pop-up menu. This wakes up the Data Link applet shown in the next picture. In the Providers tab, choose the Microsoft OLEDB providers for ODBC. In the connections tab, choose the ODBC DSN created earlier in this article using the ODBC Data Source Manager. NetChart should be selected from a list of various kinds of source names. There is no need for a username and password for this particular instance; in some cases it may be needed. The catalog is the same as the XLS file that you chose to create the report. The connection may be tested to confirm.
Next: Configuring the DataSet >>
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