Friday, March 30, 2012

New to reporting service

I am new to reporting service but has used VS 2005 beta to develop winform app for a long time. I have the following questions:

1. Are the report object and report viewer in VS2005(winform) related to those of SQL server reporting service? If yes, what are the relationship?
2. If I just want to create/view report with report viewer of VS2005 in my app which connect to SQL Server Express, do I need reporting service?
3. I can see there are options to install reporting service while installing SQL Server Express(free of charge), can I develop app for my client which use reporting service with SQL Server Express?

Thank a lot!Any idea?|||

Okay, here we go.

Reporting Services
Reporting Services is a component of SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. Basically the Reporting Services acts as a Report Repository and supports such features as:
* Server-Side Rendering = The server does the work
* Subscriptions - Reports can be generated at scheduled times and be automatically distributed to email or file shares.
* Report Snapshots - Report output can be rendered and stored on the server, for instance a monthly report can have a monthly snapshot. This way you never to need to print and store common reports, the server has the old copy even if the orginial report data is gone.

ReportViewer Control
Okay, so Reporting Services basically rocks because it solved the majority of your reporting issues and comes free with most versions of SQL Server. Now, in with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 there are 2 new controls that make reporting services even better. There is a Windows forms and asp.net ReportViewer control. The control can work in 2 modes, Remote and Local. In Remote mode it can be used to integrate with Reporting Services as users can view reports stored on the server. In local mode (what you want) it can displayed reports that have been embedded within your application. In this mode Reporting Services is not required, which makes it ideal to use with SQL Express. There are only 2 minor disadvantages to running in local mode. The first is that the client computer has to do all the work and report rendering, but its not bad for smaller applications. The second is that the client must have this ReportViewer pack installed. Basically, it contains all of the rendering pieces needed to render a report on the client machine. The great news is that if you deploy your application using the new ClickOnce, you can automatically deploy the ReportViewerPack (also it is very small like only a couple of MB!).

|||Thanks

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