September 29, 2005 at 12:45 am
Hello,
I'm absloutly new to reporting services, I understand that there is control come with reporting services to view the report but some people told me that there is a better control and also free .... can any one help.
Also if any one can direct me to the best way in involving in reporting services as fast as possible ...I must use it in my new project and I don't know much about it.
Thanks
September 30, 2005 at 1:45 am
Hi
As far as I am aware the control you are referring to is the only free control currently available. You may want to change this control slightly to add the parameter method. If you search this site you will find a document on what to do. But the control works great and what more would you want?
As far as getting to know reporting services the best way to get up to speed is just jumping right into building reports. I have used crystal extensively and I was quite happy with what reporting services has to offer. The help that ships with reporting services is great. But if you are looking for a good book I quite liked Professional SQL Server Reporting (Wrox) It covers most of what you might want to know.
September 30, 2005 at 6:11 am
Instead of a 'report control', Reporting Services reports may be opened using the application designed for the report type - a web browser (or web browser control) for HTML reports, Adobe Acrobat for PDF reports, Excel for Excel reports, and so on. If you are displaying reports on a web page, you can simply redirect the page or frame to the URL of the report:
http:// webservername/ReportServer?/Reports/MyReport&rs:Command=Render
Reporting Services also exposes a web service through which you can perform every management and reporting action available. The web-based Reporting Services Manager, which to Reporting Services what Enterprise Manager is to the SQL Server service, performs all of its actions through the web service.
One of the web methods exposed by the web service is Render. You pass in the name of the report you want, the format you want it (HTML, PFD, Excel, CSV...), your parameters, and so on. The method returns a byte array representation of the report - essentially the byte stream as if you had the report in a file, and read that file. One of this would be to run PDF reports that can be saved on the users computer, and openeed in Acrobat Reader for them.
Using the web service only requires three steps:
1. Set a web reference to the Reporting Services web service.
2. Set the security credentials of the proxy object
3. Use the Render method
' Create web service proxy object
Dim rs As New ReportService.ReportingService
' Set security credentials
rs.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials
Dim result As Byte() = Nothing
'Use the render method to return a PDF report
result = rs.Render(lstResults.SelectedItem.ToString(), "PDF", Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing)
Dim stream As FileStream = File.Create("ReportOutput.PDF", result.Length)
stream.Write(result, 0, result.Length)
stream.Close()
Process.Start("ReportOutput.PDF")
If you are familiar with building reports in Access, then you've already got the basics worked out. In fact, you can import Access reports into Reporting Services. So you can use that trick as a way to get started. You will just need to pick up some of the information on setting up report folders and permissions and stuff.
For learning materials there is an incredibly thorough book called The Hitchhikers Guide to Reporting Services, that covers any topic you'd care to look in to, start to finish, just awesome.
Eddie Wuerch
MCM: SQL
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