Technical Interview Questions IN SSRS

What are the Reporting Service Components in SSRS?
Report Designer: A platform to design and create a report and preview its output.
Report Server: Provides services for implementation and delivery of reports.
Report Manager: A Web-based administration tool for managing the Report Server.

What are the Different types of datasources used in SSRS?
Reporting Services have inbuilt features to retrive data from multiple datasources.The different types of datasources that can be used to input data to a SSRS report are:
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services for MDX, DAX, Microsoft PowerPivot, and tabular models
Microsoft Windows Azure SQL Database
Oracle
SAP NetWeaver BI
Hyperion Essbase
Microsoft SharePoint
Teradata
OLE DB
ODBC
XML

How can we deploy a SSRS report ?
There are multiple ways to deploy SSRS report on Report Server:
Deploy directly from BIDS.
Deploy by directly accessing the SSRS Report Server.
Deploy by Report Manager which is web based application.
Deploy report from share point where you can directly deploy it through share point on report server. For this SQL server needs to be installed with share point integration mode.

What is a Report Manager?
Report Manager is a web-based report access and management tool to browse existing reports, upload new reports, and other properties like execution properties, security, and subscriptions.

What is report rendering ?
Exporting a report data along with the report design is known as Report rending. SQL Server Reporting Services supports multiple file-types rendering like Word, Excel, CSV, PDF, HTML etc.

How to Disable/restrict SSRS Export format ?
We can control this and various other features of SSRS report via report services server configuration file which is available at "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.2\Reporting Services\Report Server\ rsreportserver.config".
In This File, In tag elements, add attribute Visible="false" and save the file. Now if you check, it won't be available at Export drop-down list.
We can also set an expression in the visibility function using the BuiltIn Field like the below example
iif("Globals!RenderFormat.Name="EXCELOPENXML"OR Globals!RenderFormat.Name = "MHTML" AND Parameters!format.Value = 2, False, True)

What types of query can be written in SSRS, is that just SQL / TSQL or is there anything else too?
· MDX – for OLAP / CUBE data sources
· DAX queries.

What is report subscription?
Subscriptions are request to deliver a report to the requested recipients at a particular time. The schedules can be set at different time intervals like once,none,daily weekly or monthly,etc.

What is DrillDown and DrillThrough Report?
DrillDown Reports are created by creating Groups and toggling on the columns thereby creating a tree structure.We can expand and collapse the groups using the (+) and (-) symbol respectively.Parent and child groups can be created to bring the effect.
For example,We can Group diferrent cities based on countries they belong to.

DrillThrough Reports are like subreports created to give the details of the main report.We can navigate to the drill-through report using Action property then "GoToReport" or directly give the url of the report.
Note: Normally the Details Report open in the same window as the main report but we can write JavaScript code to open it in a new window.
="javascript:void(window.open('http://server/folder/filename.aspx?ds='& Parameters!Parameter_Name.Value & '&bu=' & Fields!Field_Name.Value ,'_blank'))"

What is a Matrix Report in SSRS?
A matrix table aggregates data along a grid's x-axis and y-axis to form a summarized table. Most importantly the column values in a matrix report are dynamic unlike a tabular report where the columns are static.Both rows and column groups may have multilevel hierarchies, and there may be an infinite number of grouped members on rows and columns.

What is Cascading Parameters in SSRS?
Cascading parameters are created by creating inter-dependent parameters in SSRS.The value of one parameter is dependent on the output of another parameter that creates a depency between both the parameters theereby creating a cascading effect.
For example, there is a SSRS with three parameters as @City,@State,@Country
Now the @city is passed as an input parameter to the report dataset or report query.
@State now is dependent on the value of the @City parameter that we pass.
Similiarly, @Country is dependent on the Selected @State parameter value.
So, these 3 are called cascading parameters.