Blog Post: Quickly Create Reports for CRM 2011 with BIDS

Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) is a tool used by report designers to create custom reports for Dynamics CRM 2011. Reports can also be created from within the CRM application via the Report Wizard, but in this post we will take a look at the built in report wizard inside BIDS. Note that I will be building SQL queries in my example.

Let’s assume we need a report to display new Leads for the current year by city which will show the first name, last name, company, and website. To do this, you will first need to open up BIDS and create a new report project. In the Solution Explorer, right-click on Reports and click on Add New Report. This will execute the BIDS Report Wizard.

After clicking on Next, you will be asked to specify a data source for your report. Enter CRM into the Name field and select either Microsoft Dynamics CRM Fetch or Microsoft SQL Server in the Type field. The selection here depends on whether your deployment is hosted in the cloud or on premise. If you are hosted in the cloud, you will need to download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Report Authoring Extension.

Click Next to start building your query.

Click Next and select Tabular as the Report Type. The next screen lets us specify the properties of our report, such as the page details, field groupings, and the columns to show inside our table. We want to specify the address1_city field as the group and add all other fields into the details area.

Complete the wizard by selecting additional formatting options for the report. You will be able to preview the report inside BIDS.

I usually use the BIDS Report Wizard to design simple reports which I can then modify within the BIDS designer. We can now tidy up the column headings and modify fonts and colours if we wish so the report looks a lot more respectable.