Reporting Services Architecture - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 66

Report User Interface
As was described earlier, Reporting Services is a platform for building reporting solutions. Outside of a
flexible report processing engine and variety of development tools, a platform must provide mecha-
nisms for displaying reports to end users. In Reporting Services 2005, there are a number of ways to
expose your reports to others. In this section, you look at how you can expose reports through the
Report Manager, SharePoint Web Parts, Visual Studio controls, and custom user interfaces.
Report Manager
Report Manager is the default mechanism for exposing reports to the end user. When you install
Reporting Services 2005, two virtual directories are created. One of these is the Report Manager direc-
tory. Report Manager is a web-based application that communicates with the Reporting Services Web
service. It can display a list of folders and reports to end users for browsing. It also provides mechanisms
for users to create and modify their own subscriptions.
This interface is easy to deploy since it is included with the product. However, it does not offer a great
deal of flexibility in the user interface. There are techniques that you can use to customize the styles used
by the interface, but you cannot rearrange or modify how different parts of the application are organized
or look. The next few sections talk about other methods for exposing reports. Each one requires an
increased level of custom development to implement.
SharePoint Web Parts
One of the easiest ways to incorporate Reporting Services into another application is through the use of
SharePoint Web Parts. The SharePoint Web Parts include a Report Explorer and Report Viewer. These
controls can be used to embed Reporting Services reports into an existing site. Implementation of these
web parts takes a general understanding of both Reporting Services and SharePoint.
If you are not using SharePoint as part of your user interface, you can consider a few Visual Studio
Controls to accomplish this integration.
Visual Studio Controls
Reporting Services 2005 includes two Report Viewer controls for embedding reports into custom appli-
cations. These controls include an ASP.NET control as well as a Windows control. Both controls can
communicate with the Reporting Services XML Web service to render reports. The Windows control is
a major improvement in Reporting Services 2005. It includes a local processing mode that allows devel-
opers to supply report definitions and data sets within their own applications. This functionality enables
the creation of offline applications that still take advantage of the Reporting Services Report Processing.
For the greatest flexibility, users can create their own user interfaces through the Reporting Services
XML Web service.
Custom User Interface
The Reporting Services XML Web service contains a new Execution endpoint that allows developers to
more easily create their own user interfaces. This endpoint exposes methods for rendering reports into
various formats. Once the report is rendered, developers can take the output and send it to their own
web processing code or some other custom interface.