SQL Reporting Services Anyone?

[VBCrazyCoder]

Anyone use SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services as an alternative to crystal reports?

Just wondering about any shortcomings or experiences.

Anyone?

[nemaroller]

We're using it for creating reports for our web application, and I must say, its some powerful stuff.

The ability to create html,pdf,xml, or whatever, is awesome.

But the only real example I can give you is this:

We were creating a Rap Sheet, which a summary information page about a criminal. And of course, the boss wants a picture of the criminal on the report.

Only problem was, the pictures we save for criminals, we encrypt before we save them on the web server. So we couldn't simply throw an Image element on the report and display it, since it was encrypted.

But, in the RDL, you can define instances of custom code, which the report server will call, and we were able to add a Custom Assembly to the server bin directory, which the report server would call when it reached the Image element.

The custom assembly (a sql reporting services fancy name for your own class library), https to the web server, grabs the encrypted image, then runs the decryptor, returning an array of bytes to the Image element in the report.

After we had accomplished that feat, we were sold.

[nemaroller]

Of course, the difficultly is giving your code security access rights.

This whole document was fundamental to running our code when the report was being generated to decrypt images on the fly..

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?u...asp?frame=true

From msdn:

This is how you reference a class library (namespace)

<CodeModules>
   <CodeModule>CurrencyConversion, Version=1.0.1363.31103, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null</CodeModule>
</CodeModules>

This is how you instantiate an instance of your class.

<Classes>
   <Class>
      <ClassName>CurrencyConversion.DollarCurrencyConversion</ClassName>
      <InstanceName>m_myDollarConversion</InstanceName>
   </Class>
</Classes>

This is how you can use public members of your class:

=Code.m_myDollarCoversion.ToEUR(Fields!StandardCost.Value)

Which simply returns the result of the function call ToEur to the report server with the argument from the database field being analyzed for that record.

Pretty involving but yet fascinating stuff.

[VBCrazyCoder]

Looks intriguing. Right now my company is in the middle of trying to decide to go with Crystal (big $ for enterprise solution), or SQL Reporting. We have around 1000 reports that we are converting from an older system and want to make a good decision up front.

[Edneeis]

I'd say the main difference is that SQL Reporting is only viewable via a browser. There is no way to embed it into an application, but if that isn't a requirement then it is very good. In my opinion much better than crystal. It also can only use SQL for its data (which makes sense). There is also ActiveReports which is very good for embedded reports.