Integrating Reporting Services into Custom Applications - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 488

In this chapter you learn about:

❑ The syntax and structure for accessing Reporting Services through the URL.

❑ The reporting items that can be accessed through the URL.

❑ The parameter options that can be passed to the URL to control report output.

❑ Creating a Windows application that renders reports to the file system.

❑ Creating a web application that returns rendered reports to the browser.

❑ Easily embedding reports in a Windows application using controls.

❑ Adding report browsing and rendering to your SharePoint sites.

URL Access
Reporting Service's main means for accessing reports is through HTTP requests. These requests can be
made through URLs in a web browser or a custom application. By passing parameters in the URL, you
can specify the report item, set the output format, and perform a number of other tasks. In the next few
sections, you will look at the features available through URL requests, URL syntax, passing parameters,
and setting the output format.

URL Syntax
The basic URL syntax is as follows:

http://server/virtualroot?[/pathinfo]&[prefix:]param=value[&[prefix:]param=value]
...n]

The parameters in the syntax are as follows:

❑

server : Specifies the instance of Report Server you would like to access. To access your local
machine, you can either type the machine name or use the localhost alias.

❑

virtualroot : Specifies the IIS virtual directory you specified during the setup. When installing
Reporting Services, you must enter two virtual directories: one for the Report Manager and one
for the Reporting Services Web service. By default, the virtual directory you would access is
reportserver .

❑

pathinfo : After specifying the server and virtual directory to the Reporting Services Web service,
you can pass a number of parameters to access report objects. The first parameter you pass is
pathinfo , which specifies the path to the resource you want to access. To access the root of the
Report Server, you can simply place a single forward slash (/) .

Once you have listed the path, you can pass various parameters. These parameters will depend on the
type of object you are referencing. Reports will have a number of parameters to specify properties such
as the rendering format. Each parameter is separated by an ampersand ( & ) and contains a name=value
pair for the parameter.