Tuesday, March 20, 2012

reports in rich client

I am currently tasked with plugging our Reporting Services reports into a rich client application. Unfortunately, I am constrained to use RS2003 -- since we can't force our customers to upgrade SQLServer just yet -- which means I can't use the ReportViewer control that i hear comes bundled with 2005 beta. I have to throw together a kind of homegrown report viewer.

A couple of strategies i have in mind are
1) having an IE control hitting the Report Manager
2) having a PDF viewer control being fed reports rendered and delivered via web services

Has anyone done this? Any horror or success stories? Any thoughts on which option is best, or other options I may have overlooked?

Solution in RS 2000 (not 2003 :-)) is to embed a browser control in your application. Use your UI to drive the URL of the browser control to view the appropriate report.

The problem is that you need to set the URL to the report server, not the report manager. This mean each client knows where the report server is - this could become a maintenance problem, but is surmountable.

Regarding horror stories - we've seen that when you do this, the client print control does not work well. You might choose to disable that capability.

Hope that helps,

-Lukasz


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