August 17, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I need to create several reports that are letters. During the day from a transactional system various tasks are performed on customer data, address changes, contact information changes, legal name changes, ownership/beneficiary changes, investment changes etc. Each of these changes requires a confirmation letter to be sent to the customer and each of these letters is similar. What I want to do is create one project called 'Common Report Objects' and in there I want to have a common Address Block, Common Greeting, Common Header with Logo, Common Salutation etc. then, in the future when I need to create a new report or letter I simply reference the components that I need and pass my parameters.
I can accomplish this in two ways, 1) If I put everything in the same project as subreports or 2) I can create template subreports and place them them in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject and then when I want to add a new item, I can select the subreport that I want.
The problem with the first approach is that I don't want everything in the same project because it gets too messy and the problem with the second approach is that since each time I grab something from the template folder I get a copy of it and not a reference to it...so if something changes...for example the logo changes, or the contact number for questions changes I have to go into each project and make the change rather than changing it in one place.
Anybody have any ideas? Is there something obvious that I am missing?
Thanks,
Gary
August 18, 2009 at 12:17 am
Hi,
Wont all of your "Common Objects" be used in creating the letter anyway? The only thing that might differ is the context of the message you are sending. What I'm saying in a nutshell is, instead of having all these common objects why don't you just create 1 standard letter template, with the only thing differing is the message inside? Which you could retrieve from a sql table.
Or am I missing the point... 🙂
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August 18, 2009 at 6:22 am
I've prototype exactly what you have suggested and it works to a point. In addition to these letters there are several flavors of financial statements that all have similar 'common' components, for example a table of customer investments...this table may be referenced in a letter to the customer, an annual statement, 1099 reporting etc, ...what I am after is a common library where I can inherit these reports so that any changes to the base object will be picked up by all descendants that are referencing it.
August 18, 2009 at 8:22 am
Are you on the SQL 2008 R2 beta? It's in CTP now so you should be able to download it freely. If you check out some of the enhancements to SSRS, you may be happily surprised (ie Component Library). Obviously you couldn't put anything into production with this, but it would let you test the functionality and maybe speed your adoption of R2 when the release code drops.
Steve.
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