Designing and Developing Reports in ASP.NET 2.0
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This is the first article in a series focusing on designing/presenting native reports using ASP.NET 2.0. Throughout this series, I will focus on working with the “ReportViewer” control in local mode to develop web-based applications.
A
downloadable file is available for this article.
The entire source code for this article is available in the form of a downloadable zip file. The solution was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition together with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition. I didn't really test the solution with any other/previous editions.
Solutions for developing and designing reports in ASP.NET 2.0
We have several solutions for designing and developing reports in ASP.NET 2.0. The most robust reporting solutions recommended by Microsoft are the following:
- SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (Server Mode)
- Embedded Reporting (Local Mode) using Visual Studio 2005/Visual Web Developer
- SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services
- Crystal Reports
The first three are the solutions from Microsoft; Crystal Reports is from "Business Objects" (http://www.businessobjects.com/). To deploy Crystal Reports, based on the requirements, you may need to have a separate licensing scheme.
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services comes free, if you have at least one SQL Server 2005 license. Embedded Reporting (local mode) is part of your Visual Studio 2005 (or Visual Web Developer) and local to every application you develop. It does not depend on any other server/service/tool.
"SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services" is a bit different from all of the others listed above. First of all, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is a free database engine offered by Microsoft to embed as part of our application. It is basically a lightweight database engine for SQL Server 2005. Later came "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services," which includes a database engine (a lightweight version of the SQL Server 2005 database engine), Management Studio Express (a lightweight version of SQL Server Management Studio), Reporting Services (a free lightweight version of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services) and support for full text search.
You can download "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services" for free.
Apart from the above solutions, we also have numerous third-party reporting solutions which can be directly integrated into ASP.NET 2.0/Visual Studio environment. The following area few of the most used third-party reporting solutions:
For simple reporting (especially reports based on columns/rows/grouping), we can still depend on advanced ASP.NET 2.0 server controls like GridView, DataList, Repeater, and so on. But they lack robustness and built-in support for exporting to other formats like Excel, PDF, Charts, and so forth.
Our discussion in this series will be limited to "Embedded Reporting" (local mode). If you have Visual Studio 2005 installed on your system, you are ready to start. But if you have Visual Web Developer, you may need to download an additional add-in (free) available from Microsoft. You can also download sample SQL Server 2005 databases (provided by Microsoft).
Next: Creating a strongly-typed data set >>
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