Running a Report (Report Builder)
While designing your report, you are working with a sample representation of the data. As such, the text is displayed as Xs and the numbers as zeroes (0). The actual data is not visible in the report until it is rendered.
To see the data, you need to run, or render, the report. To run a report, click the Run Report button on the Report Builder toolbar. The results are displayed in the Report Builder run mode window. After you run the report, you can continue to refine it, save it, print it, save it as another file type, or simply view the data displayed in your report; and, if your organization is running SQL Server Enterprise edition, you can also drill through the data using clickthrough reports.
Before continuing, it might be helpful to understand how Report Builder combines the report layout with the data.
Running a Report Overview
The layout of a Report Builder report is based on an XML schema called Report Definition Language (RDL). This schema provides all the information about how the report should look when it is run. For example, RDL indicates where the data for each field should appear within the report, what colors should be used throughout the report, and where page breaks should occur.
While you design your report, you are also building the metadata that is used to retrieve your data from the data source. This metadata provides the information about the fields and entities that you have added to your report, and any sorting, grouping, filters, or functions that you want to apply to the data.
When you click the Run Report button on the Report Builder toolbar, Report Builder pushes all of your report information up to the report server. The report server extracts the query metadata from the RDL. Using the metadata, the report server retrieves the data you want and applies any filters, functions, sorting or grouping that you have specified. The report server then combines the data with the RDL and renders the report in the Report Builder run mode window on your computer.
In this Section
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
Discusses how you can continue to refine a report or view the contents of a report after the report runs. |
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Discusses how you can explore the data related to the data displayed in the report. |
See Also
Tasks
How to: Run a Report (Report Builder)
Concepts
Designing a Report (Report Builder)
Formatting a Report (Report Builder)