Large reporting projects can be simplified with a good template as a starting point. Design templates can store the company header with logo, company color palette, font preference and layout.
These are lessons learned while developing a reporting library for GE Oil & Gas, a company with very specific rules for their corporate image. We created one template for Portrait reports, one for Landscape and one for charts shown above (with corporate colors). GE even has their own company font. As a multi-national corporation, they normally need different logos displayed depending on the country where the report is rendered. That could have been done with an expression, but they agreed to one standard logo.
Saving the customized reporting template.
1. Start with a standard reporting project.
2. Create a report and customize whatever needs to meet your company standards.
- Layout: Set overall report size to Landscape or Portrait
- Header.
- Image. Link to the company logo if you have a static URL that will not change.
- Set properties on objects such as font, font size, colors.
Save the report.
3. Custom Chart Color Palette. If you have read my article on ‘Custom Color Palettes for Cognos’, then the bad news is that it is not so easy in SSRS because Microsoft hid the standard palettes in a .dll. The good news is that you can still create a custom palette and save it in your template. Jump over to the article on ‘Custom Chart Palettes in SSRS‘.
3. Save the .report files. Be sure to name them with the names you want to see in the ‘Add New Item’ choices, such as ‘MyCorp -Pie Chart.rdl’
4. Copy the .rdl files to the path appropriate for your version of SSRS.
SSRS 2008, uses Visual Studio Version 9:
‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject’
SSRS 2012, uses Visual Studio Version 10:
'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject'
Now, when you click Add New Item, the dialog box will display the standard blank template as well as your new corporate templates as shown in the screenshot above.
Update: This article got saved away as a ‘draft’ for way too long. I saw a friend tweet something similar, so I updated the path, the screenshot and I finally hit Publish. Some days I’m too busy working to blog about work. Other days I’m working and would rather be blogging.