May 11, 2009 at 1:30 am
Hello,
I'm new into studying the SqlServer 2008 Reporting Services and I've been reading about this service and the Report Builder application, so I kind of have the basic idea of the service. My problem is that I need a Report Designer integrated into my asp.net application, so that the user could create his own reports from inside my web application. I'm using Visual Studio 2008, C# and of course Reporting Services 2008. I haven't found any clues about how this can be done or if it can be done. So if anyone knows how I could provide a report builder or something like that to my end user client from the aspx page, I would really appreciate the help :-).
Thank you.
May 12, 2009 at 2:40 am
It can't be done... Report Builder is not a web application - it is a locally ran application that temporarily installs/executes on the users PC over the network
What you can do is provide a link to the report builder for the user to click, this will then enable the user to use the report builder. Any reports that they then save to the report server will appear in the Report Services as normal.
May 12, 2009 at 3:09 am
Thanks for the reply, I thought about that myself but then I was thinking about the rights the user will have on the server? How will he connect to the server to publish the reports.. will he connect through the Asp.Net user or how? considering that the application that launches the Report Builder is my web application. Thank you again.
May 12, 2009 at 3:19 am
bubu (5/12/2009)
Thanks for the reply, I thought about that myself but then I was thinking about the rights the user will have on the server? How will he connect to the server to publish the reports.. will he connect through the Asp.Net user or how? considering that the application that launches the Report Builder is my web application. Thank you again.
I assume you're building a custom front end for reporting services
I don't know what authentication model you're using for the ASP .NET application, I've done something similar in the past and used integrated windows authentication.
It works pretty smoothly, if the user does encounter anything which they don't have access to then they are prompted for a username and password - although if they can see something that they haven't got permission to then your application should handle it more elegantly than that!
To answer your question, if the user is authenticated on the domain then the authentication will be passed onto the report builder when they open that. Just as if they were using the http://[servername]/reports web page to view reports.
If you are using a different authentication model then you will encounter problems.
May 12, 2009 at 3:23 am
Try and get hold of this book... for £30 its possibly one of the best value books you can buy
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services in Action
It is 2005 specific but most of it should work for 2008
May 12, 2009 at 3:44 am
Well the authentication will be done using an user name and a password for every user, different levels of authentication and of rights. That's why I'm a little confused, because I can't just grant access on the report server to every user that will access my web site and using a windows integrated authentication is not an option. Anyway I'll look for the book you recommended and see what I can do. Thank you for your help 🙂
May 12, 2009 at 3:56 am
are these going to be internal or external users?
May 12, 2009 at 4:05 am
bubu (5/12/2009)
Well the authentication will be done using an user name and a password for every user, different levels of authentication and of rights. That's why I'm a little confused, because I can't just grant access on the report server to every user that will access my web site and using a windows integrated authentication is not an option. Anyway I'll look for the book you recommended and see what I can do. Thank you for your help 🙂
SQL 2008 BOL, provides good authentication available, please have a look into the SQL BOL.
May 12, 2009 at 4:10 am
Samuel Vella (5/12/2009)
are these going to be internal or external users?
External users... is not an intranet application.
I will take a look at SQL BOL too thank you.
May 12, 2009 at 4:17 am
bubu (5/12/2009)
External users... is not an intranet application.
Ouch! Rather you than me
Are you sure that report builder is the best solution?... if you want users to be able to "customise" their reports then there are ways of showing/hiding columns, changing filters and determining if certain objects, tables/matricies/graphs etc should be displayed or not at run time.
It just means being clever with your report authoring rather than passing that responsiblity on to the user.
May 12, 2009 at 4:32 am
Well... as the client said it... it turned out to be an end user report designer. Now I have to document on it and see if we can make that available 🙂 ...and if not, well we just have to try to convince them to go for the parametrization of the reports and make them some how custom for the user's use. I know about the hiding columns and filter data possibility...but right now...it's all in the hands of the client and project manager 😀
May 12, 2009 at 4:45 am
Well if someone else is paying...
The third way is to build the RDL documents in your own application and publish those to the report server.
The RDL documents are in an XML format, using a "wizard" approach you could take the requirements from the user and then build the RDL from pre-written XML snippets.
Once the RDL document has been formed it can be published to the Report Server by the ASP .NET application
There is a fourth way possible too, which would be a mixture of the second and third ways...
May 12, 2009 at 5:06 am
Yeah, but I think this means that I will have to build some kind of a tool that will let the user design his reports and this means that a lot of time will be spent just for the creation of this tool... time that I don't think I have... I guess now all I can do is present all the methods that we could use for this situation and wait for the answer... whichever that will be. Thank you for your help anyway... it cleared out many questions 🙂
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