Finding and Viewing Reports in Report Manager

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 a Report Manager URL might be configured on your report server, see Configuring Report Server URLs.

Your permissions on the report server determine how 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. If you are a report server administrator who is configuring read-only access to reports for other users, you must use Report Manager to create the necessary role assignments for all users or groups who require access. The simplest way to grant read-only access to reports is to assign the default Browser role to user or group accounts. For more information about roles and permissions, see How to: Grant User Access to a Report Server (Report Manager) and Tutorial: Setting Permissions in Reporting Services.

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.

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. For more information, see Contents Page (Report Manager).

  • 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).