Custom front-ends for Reporting services
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We're looking a integrating the rendering of reports into our existing Intranet.
Interested in hearing about anyone else's experiences with doing this. How have you handled security, display, etc...
If you're able to share some ASP.NET C# code that would be good as well.
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface
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We're planning to extend form based security to the reports as users may be over the web or in intranet. Parameters selected via our generated asp pages rather than using built in stuff, report paramters stored in tables on database. To restrict users to specific records then the security check will form part of the report filtering out records that the user doesnt have access to. In VS2005 theres a windows based viewer for reports for win32 apps while web apps can obviously use the browser. Does anyone have a better implementation?
Phil Nicholas -
SP2 supposedly brings you Sharepoint web parts for navigating and displaying but i havent had a chance to find or use them yet.
I have seen a method of writing your own parm pages that show within Report Manager (from memory it was from the Hitchhikers guide to RS) but it was a little bit cludgy and very hard to maintain - i felt it was more to rpove a point that it could be done.
Personally, if doing it completely for intranet, i'd be looking at implementing the WS rather than URL calls, but this approach falls over really quickly if you need to do i) drill downs; or ii) have extranet access.
My 2c
Steve.
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Steve
Ahhh ... yes we are implementing the WS. Didn't I say that? No ... oh well silly me
The main point we're trying to get our heads around at the moment is how do we maintain who has access to what reports and how does that get displayed on our intranet page.
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Colt 45 - the original point and click interface -
Hey Phil,
My plan, although not implemented yet, is to have a fat client (ie winforms app) to manage the security (and publication etc) of reports to the service. This will also let me manage the security per item/folder etc. I am stalled on this atm as i played a little with the RS2K5/SQL2K5 admin tools and the RS management is quite good within the management toolset - so do i write or do i wait.....
If/once you have the security down then displaying items hsold be simple, do a listchildren (or whatever the method is) will only deliver back what the user is allowed to see. This is of course assuming you're using windows security to access the site and then you're also taking on that current user context to make the WS calls (not too hard to implement at all).
Steve.
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Sounds fine to me, I'd go with the web based client though, unless its going to be administered by someone who doesnt know what theyre doing as its properly tested and does everything (as far as I can see at least), I think the example code for a windows client is very incomplete.
On an intranet I think your model should work fine, I do wish ms could do an elegant security implementation just once though!
Phil Nicholas -
I agree re: the sample code but one thing that will definitely stop me from using Report Manager very soon is the lack of a 'look up' for the windows user and/or groups, you need to know the group by name (not so hard) and then get them typed in correctly also. It's minor but in an organisation where the potential user base is in the thousands, so at least 20+ groups, I really want to be able to select them from list/s. I'd also like to be able to apply security to multiple items/levels in a single pass. At the end of the day, the security management piece could be written as either a win or web forms app, but as it stands atm, report manager doesn't do the job well enough for me.
Steve.
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Couldn't you just setup a few windows groups (user reporting roles) and assign them permissions to various reports/folders in RM. Then let windows authentication do the work for you?
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That' what we've done up until now, the management overhead starts when you have large user/group and item (reports, folders) counts.
The management console in SQL2K5 goes a fair way towwards solving this as it has quite a nice management facility for the RS server.
Steve.
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