Question

What are the best practices for building a report that shows data from several tables and which can be searchable by some fields, e.g by date?

The structure of the report is following:

                Today    Yesterday  Last 7 days     All
New Users         0         10        20           1000
Sold Products     11        21        31           25000

All I can think of is just building the report with stored procedure and OUTPUT parameters, it works quite fine, but it is a tedious work both on a SQL Server side and in application. I just don’t know any other way of doing this.

Maybe it can be done by using cursor or using different stored procedures or some other technique. Can you please navigate me to a better approach? I appreciate any help.

Here is my current approach

CREATE PROCEDURE sp_Statistics
    @DateFrom datetime = NULL, 
    @DateTo datetime = NULL,

    @UsersRegisteredToday int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @UsersRegisteredYesterday int = 0 OUTPUT, 
    @UsersRegisteredLastSevenDays int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @UsersRegisteredTotal int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @UsersRegisteredDate int = 0 OUTPUT,

    @SoldProductsToday int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @SoldProductsYesterday int = 0 OUTPUT, 
    @SoldProductsLastSevenDays int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @SoldProductsTotal int = 0 OUTPUT,
    @SoldProductsDate int = 0 OUTPUT
AS
BEGIN

--------------------- REGISTERED USERS -----------------------
IF (@DateFrom IS NOT NULL OR @DateTo IS NOT NULL)
    BEGIN
        SELECT @UsersRegisteredDate = COUNT(*)
        FROM [User] u
        WHERE DATEADD(DAY, DATEDIFF(D, 0, u.Date), 0) BETWEEN @DateFrom AND @DateTo
    END
ELSE IF @DateFrom IS NULL AND @DateTo IS NULL
    BEGIN
        SELECT @UsersRegisteredToday = COUNT(DISTINCT u.idUser)
        FROM [User] u
        LEFT JOIN [Order] e ON u.idUser = e.idUser
        WHERE DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), u.Date) = 0

        SELECT @UtilizadoresYesterday = COUNT(DISTINCT u.idUser)
        FROM [User] u
        LEFT JOIN [Order] e ON u.idUser = e.idUser
        WHERE DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), u.Date) = -1

        SELECT @UsersRegisteredLastSevenDays = COUNT(DISTINCT u.idUser)
        FROM [User] u
        LEFT JOIN [Order] e ON u.idUser = e.idUser
        WHERE DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), u.Date) >= -7

        SELECT @UsersRegisteredTotal = COUNT(DISTINCT u.idUser)
        FROM [User] u
        LEFT JOIN [Order] e ON u.idUser = e.idUser
    END

--------------------- SOLD PRODUCTS --------------------------
IF (@DateFrom IS NOT NULL OR @DateTo IS NOT NULL)
    BEGIN
        SELECT @SoldProductsDate = COUNT(*)
        FROM [Order] e
        WHERE e.idPaymentState = 2
              AND
              DATEADD(DAY, DATEDIFF(D, 0, e.Date), 0) BETWEEN @DateFrom AND @DateTo
    END
ELSE IF @DateFrom IS NULL AND @DateTo IS NULL
    BEGIN

        SELECT @SoldProductsToday = COUNT(*) 
        FROM [Order] e 
        LEFT JOIN [User] u ON e.idUser = u.idUser
        WHERE e.idPaymentState = 2 AND DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), e.Date) = 0

        SELECT @SoldProductsYesterday = COUNT(*)
        FROM [Order] e
        LEFT JOIN [User] u ON e.idUser = u.idUser
        WHERE e.idPaymentState = 2 AND DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), e.Date) = -1

        SELECT @SoldProductsLastSevenDays = COUNT(*)
        FROM [Order] e
        LEFT JOIN [User] u ON e.idUser = u.idUser
        WHERE e.idPaymentState = 2 AND DATEDIFF(d, GETDATE(), e.Date) >= -7

        SELECT @SoldProductsTotal = COUNT(*)
        FROM [Order] e
        LEFT JOIN [User] u ON e.idUser = u.idUser
        WHERE e.idPaymentState = 2
    END
END

Answer 1

Rather than using output params I would create a temporary table in the sp and insert the data into that and then once all the data is there do a select on it.

Creating the report itself should then be fairly easy if you use either a grid in your application or as Charleh suggested the better option of using SSRS. You can then embed the SSRS report viewer into your application.