Finding and Viewing Reports in Report Manager (Report Builder 3.0 and SSRS)

Report Manager is a Web-based tool that includes features for viewing and managing reports. It is part of a report server installation. To open Report Manager, type the Report Manager URL in a browser window. You must use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later to open Report Manager. For more information about how a Report Manager URL might be configured on your report server, contact your system administrator. For more information, see Report Servers and SharePoint Report Servers (Report Builder 3.0 and SSRS).

The permissions that the system administrator set on the report server determine what you can see when you use Report Manager. Permissions are granted via a role assignment. To find and view reports, your role assignment must include the View Reports task. To find a report on a report server, search for it by name or description, or browse report server folders. You can only search or browse for reports that have been published or uploaded to the report server. For more information about how to search for a report, see Searching for Reports and Other Items (Report Builder 3.0 and SSRS).

Note

You can create and modify report definitions (.rdl) in Report Builder 3.0 and in Report Designer in Business Intelligence Development Studio. Each authoring environment provides different ways to create, open, and save reports and related items. For more information, see Designing Reports in Report Designer and Report Builder 3.0 (SSRS) on the Web at microsoft.com.

To browse for the reports that you want to run, you can use the Contents page, which appears automatically when you start Report Manager and when you open any folder in the folder hierarchy. The Contents page shows only the items that you have permission to view. The folder path is displayed as a row of links at the top of the Contents page. Folder names are listed in sequence, starting with the root folder (Home). As you open each additional folder, the folder name is added to the folder path at the top of the page. When you open a report, the name of the report is also added to the folder path.

Folder navigation links

Folder navigation links

Use the following techniques to navigate through a folder hierarchy:

  • To view the contents of a folder, click the folder name on the Contents page. A folder page opens, displaying the contents of the folder.

  • To navigate down through the folder hierarchy, open a subfolder of the current folder. Folders contain reports, resources, shared data source items, and other folders. Clicking a folder icon opens the folder, showing the contents of the hierarchy one level down.

  • To navigate up through the folder hierarchy, in the row of links at the top of the page, click the name of the folder whose contents you want to see.

Opening a Report

After you find a report, click the report name to open it. The report is rendered in HTML and appears in the Contents page in Report Manager. Reports are always cached by the browser session, so if you open a report, you can usually return to it by clicking the Back button. This is true even if you were required to supply a user name and password to run the report. You cannot fully close a rendered report until you close the browser.

Not all reports that are visible in the folder hierarchy are immediately accessible. Some reports may prompt you for your user name and password to determine whether you can access the data source for the report. For more information about opening reports in Report Manager, see How to: Open and Close a Report (Report Manager).

You can also browse to and open a report from the report server directly from Report Builder. For more information, see Searching for Reports and Other Items (Report Builder 3.0 and SSRS).