How To: Create a “Risk over Time” Report for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

  • Article

 

patterns & practices Developer Center

Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Retired Content

This content is outdated and is no longer being maintained. It is provided as a courtesy for individuals who are still using these technologies. This page may contain URLs that were valid when originally published, but now link to sites or pages that no longer exist.

J.D. Meier, Jason Taylor, Prashant Bansode, Alex Mackman, and Kevin Jones
Microsoft Corporation

September 2007

Applies To

  • Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)
  • Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services

Summary

This How To article walks you through the process of creating a new report that shows how Risk work items trend over time. The article then shows you how to publish it to the team reporting portal in TFS.

Contents

  • Objectives
  • Overview
  • Summary of Steps
  • Before You Begin
  • Step 1 – Create a New Reporting Project
  • Step 2 – Create the Data Sources
  • Step 3 – Create a New Report in Your Project
  • Step 4 – Modify the Report
  • Step 5 – Deploy the Report to your Team Foundation Server
  • Step 6 – Test the Report
  • Additional Resources

Objectives

  • Create a reporting project in Visual Studio.
  • Create a new Risk over Time report in the reporting project.
  • Publish the Risk over Time report to the report server.

Overview

The reports that ship with VSTS are SQL Server Reporting Services reports. You can amend these reports or create your own custom reports by using the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Designer inside Visual Studio (Business Intelligence Development Studio[BISD]), which ships with the SQL Server 2005 client tools. To create a custom report, you create a Report Project in Visual Studio and then create data sources to connect to the TFS relational database and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) database. This How To article shows how to create a simple report from scratch - the Risk over Time report that identifies number of Risk work items over a given period of time.

Summary of Steps

  • Step 1 – Create a New Reporting Project
  • Step 2 – Create the Data Sources
  • Step 3 – Create a New Report in Your Project
  • Step 4 – Modify the Report
  • Step 5 – Deploy the Report to your Team Foundation Server
  • Step 6 – Test the Report

Before You Begin

Before you can customize a report for TFS, you must ensure you have the following prerequisites in place:

  • You must have Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) installed on the machine you will be using to customize the report.  To verify whether BIDS is installed, check Visual Studio to see if you have the Business Intelligence Project type option when you create a new project.
  • Your user account must be a member of the Microsoft Analysis Server TfsWarehouseDataReaders security role on the data-tier server.
  • Your user account must have administrator rights to the TFSWarehouse database on the data tier.
  • Your user account must be a member of the SQL Server Reporting Services Publisher role on the application-tier server.
  • The project must contain Risk work items so that the report shows some data.

Step 1 – Create a New Reporting Project

In this initial step, you create a new reporting project so that you can add a new report to the project and then customize the report. Perform the following steps to create a new reporting project in Visual Studio:

  1. Click File, then click New, and then click Project.
  2. Select the Business Intelligence Project type.
  3. Select the Report Server Project template.
  4. Set your project’s Name and Location and then click OK.

Step 2 – Create the Data Sources

In order to edit and publish the customized report you first need to add data sources for the TFS data warehouse and OLAP cube.  Once these data sources are added to the Visual Studio project the report can pull data from the server.

To create the warehouse data source:

  1. In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, right-click Shared Data Sources and then click Add New Data Source.
  2. On the General tab, in the Name text box , enter TfsReportDS .
  3. Select Microsoft SQL Server from the Type combo box.
  4. Click the Edit… button.
  5. Fill in your data tier server name.
  6. Select the TFSWarehouse database.
  7. Click the OK button twice to add the data source.

To create the OLAP data source:

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click Shared Data Sources and then click Add New Data Source.
  2. On the General tab, in the Name text box, enter TfsOlapReportDS .
  3. Select Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services from the Type combo box.
  4. Click the Edit… button.
  5. Fill in your data tier server name.
  6. Select the TFSWarehouse database.
  7. Click the OK button twice to add the data source.

Step 3 – Create a New Report in Your Project

Now that the data sources have been added to your project you can add a new report. Perform the following steps to add a new report to your project and customize it:

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click Reports and then select Add->New Item...
  2. Select the Report template.
  3. Name the report and click OK

Step 4 – Modify the Report

After you have added a report to the project you can modify the report as follows:

  1. If the Report Designer doesn't open automatically, open the report for modification by double clicking it in the Solution Explorer.
  2. Click the Dataset drop down and the select <New Dataset...>.
  3. Name the dataset, example TestDataSet.
  4. Select TFSOlapReportDS (shared) and then click OK.
  5. Click the ... button next to Build (just below the Dataset drop down list) and then select Team System.
  6. In the Dataset Tree, expand Measures.
  7. In the Dataset Tree, expand Current Work Item.
  8. Drag Current Work Item Count into the main query window.
  9. In the Dataset Tree, collapse Measures.
  10. Scroll down to Team Project and drag it into the DimensionsGrid.
  11. In the Dimensions Grid, click the Filter Expression cell and select your team project name. This filters the results to just your team project.
  12. Expand the Work Item dimension in the Dataset Tree.
  13. Drag WorkItem.WorkItemType from the Dataset Tree into the Dimensions Grid. You may see System_WorkItemType instead of WorkItem.WorkItemType, if this is the case it will still work, but it means you should apply SQL Server Service Pack 2. 
  14. Drag WorkItem.WorkItemType from the Dataset Tree into the main query window and drop it in front of the work item count column. You may see System_WorkItemType instead of WorkItem.WorkItemType, if this is the case it will still work, but it means you should apply SQL Server Service Pack 2. 
  15. In the Dimensions Grid, click the Filter Expression cell and then select the Risk type. This filters the results to include only Risk work item types.
  16. In the Dataset Tree, expand the Date dimension**.**
  17. Drag the Date dimension value into the main query window; dropping it in front of the work item type column.
  18. Click the Layout tab.
  19. Open the Toolbox window.
  20. Drag the Chart item from the Toolbox to the layout grid.
  21. Adjust the size of the chart to fit.
  22. Right-click on the chart and then select Chart Type Line SmoothLine.
  23.  Open the DatasetsPane.
  24.  Expand your data set, for example, TestDataSet.
  25.  Highlight the graph so that the Data, Series and Category drop targets appear.
  26.  Drop Current_Work_Item_Count into the Drop Data Fields Here drop target box.
  27.  Drop Work_Item_Type into the Drop Series Fields Here drop target box.
  28.  Drop Date into the Drop Category Fields Here drop target box.
  29.  Right-click the graph and then select Properties.
  30.  Enter a title for your graph and then click OK.
  31.  Click the Preview tab to view what the report will look like.

Step 5 – Deploy the Report to your Team Foundation Server

After you’ve created the Risk over Time report, you can deploy it to your team project’s reporting portal by performing the following steps:

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click on the report project and then click Properties.
  2. Ensure that OverwriteDataSources is set to false.
  3. Modify TargetDataSourceFolder to reflect your team project name; for example: TargetDataSourceFolder = TestProject.
  4. Modify TargetReportFolder to reflect your team project name; for example: TargetDataSourceFolder = TestProject.
  5. Modify TargetDataSourceFolderto http://<data-tier servername>/reportserver; for example: TargetDataSourceFolder = http://tfsrtm/reportserver.
  6. Click OK.
  7. In Solution Explorer, right-click on the .rdl file and then click Deploy.
  8. Observe the Output Pane to verify for successful completion.

Step 6 – Test the report

After you’ve published the report to your team project’s report server you can test it to make sure it was successfully deployed:

  1. In Team Explorer expand your team project node, right-click on Reports and then select Show Report Site.
  2. On the report site, select the report you just created.
  3. Verify that the report looks as you expected.

Additional Resources

patterns & practices Developer Center