Integrating Reporting Services with My Own Front End?

Greetings!
Okay, kind of a newbie question here. Maybe you more experienced folks can
help. I've got RS up & running okay. I'm hoping you can lead me to info
and/or examples of using Reporting Services, but integrating it into my own
ASP.NET front end pages. The Reporting Services-supplied front end is very
nice, but the look & feel is not consistent with our other pages.
Thanks in advance,
Joel Koblich
www.3cms.orgThere are several ways to integrate your own front end. The easiest way is
to use URL integration. The advantage of this is that you can easily call
any report passing it parameters. If you want to hide parameters from your
user then this gets to be dicey. Also, you get full functionality with URL
integration (drill down, drill through). You can also use web services. You
render a stream and do with it as you will. However, you have to handle some
of the features yourself that come for free with URL integration. That being
the case, why would someone want to use web services. A big reason could be
that the application is internet facing and the report server is being the
firewall. URL integration will not work for this scenario.
With RS 2005 (release date November) and Widbey (Visual Studio 2005, same
release date) you can use the new web and winform controls. These will make
integrating with RS reports much easier. If you want you can not even have a
report server, you can operate in local mode and give the control the report
and the dataset(s) and away it goes. However, you do lose functionality in
local mode. Not all rendering options are available, you don't have caching,
subscriptions etc. Having a server in the picture does provide value, but,
depending on your circumstances the new controls operating in local mode
might be all you need (the controls are distributed with VS). These controls
are available with the latest public beta of Widbey.
One thing to keep in mind when rolling your own is deciding on security.
Depending on what you are doing you might need to implement forms based
security.
Bruce Loehle-Conger
MVP SQL Server Reporting Services
"Joel Just Joel" <joeljustjoel@.att_DO_NOT_LIKE_SPAM.net> wrote in message
news:8N6te.985661$w62.310982@.bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
> Greetings!
> Okay, kind of a newbie question here. Maybe you more experienced folks
> can help. I've got RS up & running okay. I'm hoping you can lead me to
> info and/or examples of using Reporting Services, but integrating it into
> my own ASP.NET front end pages. The Reporting Services-supplied front end
> is very nice, but the look & feel is not consistent with our other pages.
> Thanks in advance,
> Joel Koblich
> www.3cms.org
>|||Thanks! That helps a lot.
Joel
"Bruce L-C [MVP]" <bruce_lcNOSPAM@.hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:%2352a8WOdFHA.1456@.TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...
> There are several ways to integrate your own front end. The easiest way is
> to use URL integration. The advantage of this is that you can easily call
> any report passing it parameters. If you want to hide parameters from your
> user then this gets to be dicey. Also, you get full functionality with URL
> integration (drill down, drill through). You can also use web services.
> You render a stream and do with it as you will. However, you have to
> handle some of the features yourself that come for free with URL
> integration. That being the case, why would someone want to use web
> services. A big reason could be that the application is internet facing
> and the report server is being the firewall. URL integration will not work
> for this scenario.
> With RS 2005 (release date November) and Widbey (Visual Studio 2005, same
> release date) you can use the new web and winform controls. These will
> make integrating with RS reports much easier. If you want you can not even
> have a report server, you can operate in local mode and give the control
> the report and the dataset(s) and away it goes. However, you do lose
> functionality in local mode. Not all rendering options are available, you
> don't have caching, subscriptions etc. Having a server in the picture does
> provide value, but, depending on your circumstances the new controls
> operating in local mode might be all you need (the controls are
> distributed with VS). These controls are available with the latest public
> beta of Widbey.
> One thing to keep in mind when rolling your own is deciding on security.
> Depending on what you are doing you might need to implement forms based
> security.
>
> --
> Bruce Loehle-Conger
> MVP SQL Server Reporting Services
>
> "Joel Just Joel" <joeljustjoel@.att_DO_NOT_LIKE_SPAM.net> wrote in message
> news:8N6te.985661$w62.310982@.bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
>> Greetings!
>> Okay, kind of a newbie question here. Maybe you more experienced folks
>> can help. I've got RS up & running okay. I'm hoping you can lead me to
>> info and/or examples of using Reporting Services, but integrating it into
>> my own ASP.NET front end pages. The Reporting Services-supplied front
>> end is very nice, but the look & feel is not consistent with our other
>> pages.
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Joel Koblich
>> www.3cms.org
>|||Bruce,
Do you know if the VS 2005 web control will use SOAP or URL when it is
operating in "Remote" mode? I have been trying to determine if VS2005/SQL2005
will solve this issue for us, over SSRS 2000.
Thanks,
Steve
"Bruce L-C [MVP]" wrote:
> There are several ways to integrate your own front end. The easiest way is
> to use URL integration. The advantage of this is that you can easily call
> any report passing it parameters. If you want to hide parameters from your
> user then this gets to be dicey. Also, you get full functionality with URL
> integration (drill down, drill through). You can also use web services. You
> render a stream and do with it as you will. However, you have to handle some
> of the features yourself that come for free with URL integration. That being
> the case, why would someone want to use web services. A big reason could be
> that the application is internet facing and the report server is being the
> firewall. URL integration will not work for this scenario.
> With RS 2005 (release date November) and Widbey (Visual Studio 2005, same
> release date) you can use the new web and winform controls. These will make
> integrating with RS reports much easier. If you want you can not even have a
> report server, you can operate in local mode and give the control the report
> and the dataset(s) and away it goes. However, you do lose functionality in
> local mode. Not all rendering options are available, you don't have caching,
> subscriptions etc. Having a server in the picture does provide value, but,
> depending on your circumstances the new controls operating in local mode
> might be all you need (the controls are distributed with VS). These controls
> are available with the latest public beta of Widbey.
> One thing to keep in mind when rolling your own is deciding on security.
> Depending on what you are doing you might need to implement forms based
> security.
>
> --
> Bruce Loehle-Conger
> MVP SQL Server Reporting Services
>
> "Joel Just Joel" <joeljustjoel@.att_DO_NOT_LIKE_SPAM.net> wrote in message
> news:8N6te.985661$w62.310982@.bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
> > Greetings!
> >
> > Okay, kind of a newbie question here. Maybe you more experienced folks
> > can help. I've got RS up & running okay. I'm hoping you can lead me to
> > info and/or examples of using Reporting Services, but integrating it into
> > my own ASP.NET front end pages. The Reporting Services-supplied front end
> > is very nice, but the look & feel is not consistent with our other pages.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Joel Koblich
> > www.3cms.org
> >
>
>