Today, we released MicroCharts for Reporting Services 2005. You now can create sparkline enabled reports and dashboards with "more information per square inch" using Microsofts Standard Report Writer:

  
Once you have installed MicroCharts for Reporting Services 2005, you have a set of MicroCharts controls available in your Toolbox.

The MicroCharts controls can be used in the same way as other controls, i.e. the Textbox, you drag the MicroCharts control from the Toolbox into your report. MicroCharts are designed for use in the Reporting Services table object, and can simply be dragged into a column.

After you have placed you MicroCharts control in the report you can format the charts by right clicking it and selecting the command Properties:

The command opens the MicroCharts formatting dialog box which allows you to specify the chart’s formatting options:

The data is configured in the Values property of the standard properties pane under the Data section:

The MicroChart Value properties can be set to a normal Field Expression like

=Fields!LastMonths.Value

For any fields with more than 1 value (i.e. a MicroLine data series) the data values are defined as a pipe separated string

“Value1|Value2|…|ValueN”

To generate a pipe separated string in Analysis Services use an MDX expression like

GENERATE(LASTPERIODS(12,[Time].CurrentMember), [MyMeasure], "|")

And For SQL Server use an expression like

[Field1] + ‘|’ + [Field2] + ‘|’ + … + [FieldN]

All chart formatting properties are also available as in the standard properties pane under MicroCharts.

The formatting properties can use expressions to calculate the property directly from the data set:

For example you can achieve a dynamic chart scaling by calculating the Min/Max properties of the bar chart by using the formulas

=Round(Min(Fields!Variance_.Value)*1.2,1)

=Round(Max(Fields!Variance_.Value)*1.2,1)

The Action properties in the general property pane allow you to define a Jump into a detailed report.

To define the Jump parameters press the … button

Optionally you can pass parameters from the calling report to the target report:

Supported Data Sources

• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Analysis Services,
• OLEDB, ODBC
• Sap BI NetWeaver
• Hyperion Essbase
• Oracle
• Teradata

Features

• Line, area, column, pie, win-lose, icon and bar charts
• Bullet graphs - an effective replacement for dashboard gauges.
• All properties support expressions
• Support for Actions
• Intuitive formatting interface

We will soon release a version that supports Reporting Services 2008, so stay tuned!