Create Reports for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Using SQL Server Reporting Services

Article
05/31/2017
2 minutes to read

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2011

Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes reports that provide useful business information to the user. These reports are based on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, and provide the same set of features that are available for the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services reports. For more information, see SQL Server Reporting Services.

The report definition (data and layout) of Microsoft Dynamics CRM reports are contained in an .rdl file, and the contents of the .rdl file conform to the Microsoft SQL Server Report Definition Language Specification. For more information, see Report Definition Language Reference.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides many out-of-box reports for viewing your business data. You can create custom reports using one of these reports as templates or can create a custom report from scratch.

There are two types of reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM:

SQL-based
These reports use SQL queries to securely retrieve data for reports from filtered views defined by the system. These are the same reports that have been available for previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The default reports that are shipped with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 are SQL-based reports.

For security reasons, you cannot deploy custom SQL-based reports to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
Fetch-based
These reports are introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and use FetchXML queries to retrieve data for reports. You can deploy custom fetch-based reports to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and to on-premises Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. All reports that are created using the Report Wizard in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 are Fetch-based reports.

Reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online run in sandbox mode, and this is done by enabling RDL sandboxing in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. As a result, certain features might not be available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. For example, custom code in your report definition will not work. For more information, see Enabling and Disabling RDL Sandboxing.