Report Viewer for SSRS

Having a number of SSRS reports is all well and good, but if the end users can not see the reports it is useless, therefore we need to generate a method of viewing the reports via a small application.

The Report Viewer application will be built using C# .NET 2.0, and is configurable by the Web Services supplied by Reporting Services. The Reporting Services Web Services is an industry standard way of accessing information via SOAP. This tool was developed to be a small report viewer for SQL Server Reporting Services.

The Web Services supplied by Reporting Services provide an interface in the reporting engine to gain access to the reports and the report inner workings. By interfacing to the Reporting Services Web Services we can extract the available reports that have been loaded on to the Reporting Services Server.

When the Report Viewer is loaded it will communicate to the Report Server, which is configurable via the application configuration file, to retrieve a list of available reports and folders.

The reports and folders can then be displayed within the Report Viewer as a list, upon selecting a folder the Report Viewer will then go in to that folder and return a list of reports and folders. It is important to note that only visible objects will be displayed, any objects that have been set to hidden will not be displayed in the Report Viewer. This allows for ancillary objects, like images and data sources, to be hidden from the end users.

Once a report has been selected the parameters for that report are dynamically displayed by the Report Viewer, looking at the parameter list from the Report Server Web Services and generating the required requests.

Once all the parameters have been captured the Report Viewer will make a request to the Report Server via HTML to retrieve the report and pass the parameters, this will allow for the Report Viewer to display the report to the user, who can then elect to either print or export the report is they so desire.

This code is intended to provide viewer for SQL Reporting Services that uses exclusively the SOAP API for rendering. The Viewer will be embedded as a Custom User Controls fragment into the calling form.

This document will help you if you are looking for more control over how you can integrate a report and its parameters into the Report Viewer application that may use different authentication methods than Reporting Services, usually if you want something more than what you already find in the ReportViewer web server control. All prompts for parameters are created dynamically and you can easily apply different formatting or even hide some of them.

Using the Report Viewer is very simple, just supplying the, Report Server WSDL path, the location of the Report Server and if you need to the report folder.

Setting up the application configuration file, follows the Microsoft standard for attaching to Web Services, and providing application parameters, an example of an app.config file is listed below:

Example C# code for using and calling the Report Viewer:

//Instantiate the object EH.ReportViewer.Reports r = new EH.ReportViewer.Reports();

//Pass the report folder you wish to start in, if this is not supplied then the root will be used r.ReportFolder = "/Photonet Reports Project"; //Load a single form, if you leave this out a collection of forms will be displayed reports.ReportName = ReportName; //Display the reports r.DisplayReports();