Rendering Reports from .NET Applications

Summary

In this chapter, we showed how to use the URL access capabilities of SSRS 2005 and the new ReportViewer controls to embed reports quickly into applications. Beyond the WebBrowser and ReportViewer controls used in this chapter, you can use other applications to render reports. For example, SSRS 2005 includes a new Report Viewer Web Part for Windows Share- Point Services and SharePoint Portal Server as well as a Report Explorer Web Part. We’ll discuss using these in greater detail in Chapter 10. By combining SharePoint and SSRS 2005, you can quickly build a portal that displays your reports without much code at all.

In this chapter, you also learned how to make Report Server Web service calls to augment your Windows Forms viewer application. The application you created allows you to type the URL of a server-based report you want to view. It then uses SSRS 2005’s GetReportParameters method to retrieve a list of report parameters and the ValidValues method to retrieve possible values. It then reads the values selected by the user and populates an array of ReportParamters, which is then used by the Report Viewer control to render your report with the selected parameters. In Chapter 8, we’ll expand on this example by using the Report Server Web service to allow the user to set the report to run on a schedule with the supplied parameters instead of rendering it immediately.