Tutorial: Customizing Report Builder Clickthrough Reports

A person reading a Report Builder report can click the interactive data in the columns and rows to generate new reports about that data. These new reports, called clickthrough reports, are automatically generated from the default detail attributes for the target entity and the default aggregate attributes for the target entity's related entities. Depending on how you assign these attributes when designing your model, you can create an infinite clickthrough experience for people creating Report Builder reports and their report readers.

The appearance of the clickthrough report depends on whether the data clicked is a scalar value or an aggregate value. When a scalar value is clicked, the single instance report template is used to display the data as a list of values. When an aggregate value is clicked, the multiple instance report template is used to display the data in a table.

Rather than relying on the automatic report templates that are used for clickthrough reports, you can create your own customized reports and use them as the clickthrough report instead. For example, suppose you want a report that provides pertinent information about a specific product to be displayed when a person reading a Report Builder report clicks the product name in the main report. Rather than use the automatically generated single instance report, you can create a report that contains specific data about the product that you want your report readers to see.

In this tutorial, you will create a Report Builder report, and then learn how to link the report to an entity in the report model. After you link the report to the model, you will verify the changes that you made.

Note

Clickthrough reports are available only when running SQL Server Enterprise. If you are unsure of which edition of SQL Server that your organization is running, contact your database administrator.

Important

SQL Server samples and sample databases must be downloaded and installed before you can view or work with them. For more information, see Considerations for Installing SQL Server Samples and Sample Databases.

Note

SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services includes both Report Builder 1.0 and Report Builder 3.0. Unless otherwise specified, procedures in this tutorial apply to both versions of Report Builder.

Requirements

To use this tutorial, your system must have the following installed:

  • SQL Server Enterprise Reporting Services with the AdventureWorks2008R2 database and the Adventure Works report model deployed.

  • Support for clickthrough reports is not available in any other version of SQL Server. Support for models is not available in editions of SQL Server Express. For more information, see Features Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2.

  • Business Intelligence Development Studio.

  • SQL Server Management Studio.

  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 on the system that will run Report Builder1.0 and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 on the system that will run Report Builder 3.0.

You must have the following permissions:

  • To deploy and publish the report model, you need to be assigned to the Content Manager or Publisher role.

  • Permissions to retrieve data from the AdventureWorks2008R2 database.