SSRS is SQL Server Reporting Services

This seems to be the Microsoft answer to Crystal Reports. It is a business intelligence tool which allows one to specify data sources in an XML format with .rds extensions like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RptDataSource xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
   <Name>Foo</Name>
   <DataSourceID>bbd14aea-fbce-49eb-8e40-fb711b20983a</DataSourceID>
   <ConnectionProperties>
      <Extension>SQL</Extension>
      <ConnectString>data source=Bar;initial catalog=Baz</ConnectString>
   </ConnectionProperties>
</RptDataSource>

 
 

I do not yet understand what the Guid above is for. An .rdl file is an actual report. Again, there is an XML format:

<DataSets>
   <DataSet Name="Foo">
      <Fields>
         <Field Name="Bar">
            <DataField>modified</DataField>
            <rd:TypeName>System.DateTime</rd:TypeName>
         </Field>
      </Fields>
      <Query>
         <DataSourceName>Baz</DataSourceName>
         <CommandText>SELECT * FROM dbo.Qux</CommandText>
      </Query>
   </DataSet>
</DataSets>

 
 

One may specify a stored procedure in lieu of just having SQL in the report. In this case we would call a stored procedure named "StoredProcedure":

<CommandType>StoredProcedure</CommandType>

 
 

The reports, which need the datasources, seem to be collected into what appear to be to be Visual Studio projects with a .csproj file that I may open to bring up Visual Studio 2008 to see a collection of the reports. However, this says that one uses "Microsoft Visual Studio, with the included Business Intelligence Projects plug-in installed or with the included Report Builder, a simplified tool that does not offer all the functionality of Visual Studio" in order to use SSRS. I installed something called BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) which may be empowering Visual Studio 2008 to let me play with the SSRS reports. The typical way in which one hosts SSRS reports is to somehow compile them directly out of the XML stuff into blobs that live directly at a MSSQL database. From MSSQL there is apparently a way to get the reports back out into XML format too. I can right-click on an .rdl and select "Run" from the Soultion Explorer to run a report in my local environment. Some extent for visual formatting for a report may be baked into a .rdl.