What's New in Report Builder 3.0 August CTP
[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]
Note
Because SQL Server 2008 R2 is a minor version upgrade of SQL Server 2008, we recommend that you also review the content in the SQL Server 2008 section.
The August Community Technology Preview (CTP) adds new functionality for Report Builder 3.0. With this release, you can now add maps to your reports so your users can visualize your data in a geographic or spatial context. Your report design and preview experience is improved because of cached datasets, and because you can change credentials more easily. And you can produce data feeds from your reports by using Atom rendering.
Maps
Report Builder 3.0 provides a Map Wizard and Map Layer Wizard to add maps and map layers to your report to help visualize data against a geographic background. A map layer displays map elements based on spatial data from a map in the Map Gallery, from a SQL Server query that returns SQL Server spatial data, or from an Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) shapefile. Map elements can be polygons that represent shapes or areas, lines that represent paths or routes, or points that represent locations such as stores or cities. You can also add a background that displays Bing map tiles.
After you relate map elements with report data, you can specify rules for the map elements on each layer that control color, size, width, or marker type. For example, you can add a bubble map that varies bubble size for store locations based on sales or a color analytical map that displays customer demographics for geographic regions.
You can add labels, legends, titles, a color scale, and a distance scale to help your users interpret the map display. You can add interactive features such as tooltips and drillthrough links, or provide parameters that enable a user to interactively control the visibility of each layer.
For more information, see Maps (Report Builder 3.0).
Previewing Reports
Report Builder 3.0 provides a better preview experience. The introduction of edit sessions enable the reuse of cached datasets when previewing reports. This means that reports render more quickly when using the cached datasets. Edit sessions are bound to a report which makes it possible to use relative references and subreport references in reports. For more information see, Previewing Reports in Report Builder 3.0.
Making it Easier to Design and Edit Reports
The run-time credentials, specified in the data source properties of a report, might not work for design time tasks such as creating queries and previewing reports. Report Builder 3.0 provides a user interface for changing credentials when it is unable to connect to the data source. For more information, see Data Source Properties Dialog Box, General (Report Builder 3.0)
Rendering Reports to Data Feeds
The Atom rendering extension renders reports data to an Atom service document, which lists the data feeds and the data feeds, which contains the report data. You use this extension to generate Atom-compliant data feeds that are readable and exchangeable with applications that can consume data feeds generated from reports. For example the Gemini client can consume data feeds that are generated from Atom-compliant data feeds.
Using report data as data feeds gives you an additional way to provide data to applications when the data is not easily accessible through client data providers, or you prefer to hide the complexity of the data source and make it simpler to use the data.
You can export report data to an Atom service document and data feeds from Report Manager or a SharePoint site that is integrated with Reporting Services. For more information, see Generating Data Feeds from Reports (Report Builder 3.0).