Dashboard reports provide a way of grouping reports that contain related data in a single layout. Often, the purpose of a dashboard report is to give an overall picture of a specific part of your business. Accordingly, when you configure the dashboard, you should limit the amount of information displayed for each member report to make it more readable.
To create a new dashboard report:
Right-click the Reports folder, click New > Dashboard and add the member reports.
Save an existing dashboard report with a new name and then add or delete the member reports as required.
When you design the layout of a dashboard, consider the amount of information you want to present for each report on the page. To present only the most useful information for each report, Reporting Center provides the Data Record Limit setting, which allows you to determine the number of rows to display so that the dashboard is readable.
When you open a dashboard report, the Reporting Console displays the chart or table containing the limited number of data records. In the Reporting Console, you can use a scroll bar to view rows that did not fit into the page layout you chose, or you can click the title of the report to view all data records.
When you view a deployed report in a Web browser, SSRS does not provide a scroll bar, so it displays only the number of rows that fit onto the page size you chose in the Deploy Report wizard. Because additional rows are truncated by SSRS, use the Data Record Limit setting in the Console to ensure that the member reports of the dashboard are displayed correctly. In SSRS, if you want to view the complete report, first ensure that the member report is deployed, and then click the title of the member report.
Because member reports are embedded in dashboard reports rather than linked, if you modify and redeploy a report that is also in a dashboard, you must also redeploy the dashboard report. You can also deploy a dashboard without deploying individual member reports. In such cases, you can view the deployed dashboard, but cannot click the report title to view the complete report.
In a dashboard report, you can create shared dashboard contexts by using the existing contexts from member reports and overriding the default context values. Changing a report context to a shared dashboard context does not modify the value of context in the original report. Shared contexts just provide flexibility for the way you configure the dashboard. Instead of changing contexts in several individual reports and then adding them to the dashboard, you just override the default context values of the existing member reports. Member reports can use a combination of shared dashboard contexts and default report contexts.
When you create a dashboard, the Reporting Console displays the contexts found in the member reports. Often, more than one report contains the same context type, such as Time or Data Source Connection, with different values.
You can share these contexts to have all reports use them. For example, the same time period or retrieve data from the same database. In these cases, the Reporting Console displays the default values of the context from one of the reports and allows you to customize the context values for the dashboard. For example, if the member reports of your dashboard display data for a number of different time periods, and you want them all to show data for the last 14 days, share the Time context so that it overrides the default values for each report. Or, if you have two reports that retrieve data from two different databases, you can override contexts so that both reports retrieve data from the same database.
NOTE:You can configure Contexts only in the Reporting Console and not in SSRS.