Creating Indicators

Let's assume that you've created a basic tabular report as follows:

The report in Design view	The report in Preview view

We now want to put an indicator in the third column.  The first step, surprisingly, is to add a rectangle.

Step One - Adding a Rectangle

The reason you may need to add a rectangle first is to avoid effects like this:

In this example, when a film name spans more than one line, so does its indicator. This usually looks messy!

By placing an indicator inside a rectangle, you can stop SSRS stretching indicators as above.

Drag the Rectangle tool shown into the text box highlighted

Step Two - Adding the Indicator

Once you've added a rectangle, you can add an indicator to it:

Drag the Indicator tool shown onto the rectangle we've just added

You can now choose an indicator from the palette.  There are two things to note about the palette shown below:

1. The categories on the left - Directional, Symbols, etc - are pointless, since you can see all the visible symbols in one go anyway.
2. It doesn't matter too much which symbol you choose, as it's easy enough to make changes afterwards anyway.

The possible indicators you can add

In our case we'll choose the star symbols, although we'll need to modify these later to change the colour and number of symbols:

Note that these symbols don't mean that you will get one, two, three, for our five stars - instead they mean that you will always get one star, but the degree of shading will vary.

 Step Three - Assigning a Data Field

The next question is: what does the indicator we've just added indicate?  The easiest way to add this is as follows:

Click on the indicator you've just added, then click on the drop down arrow shown and choose a field to assign to it. Here we're showing the length of films.

If you've followed the steps above, you should now have a fairly unpromising-looking indicator!

Since SSRS has set default scaling, the results aren't what we want.

It's time now to consider the issue of scaling.