Gumbatman


Hello,

We have a small .NET intranet site and I have some experience with Reporting Services. What I am looking to do is develop some reports on our website. However, I would like to make it so the user can do some customization of their reports.

For example, there would be sections of reports (Headcounts, Turnover, etc.) and in each section there would be measurements they could click to include. So I could select the Headcounts section and select the measurements such as Terminations, Hires, and Period End Headcount. I may not select the Turnover sections at all. I am almost thinking like a Google page where you can move around the sections and have your own customized report. Maybe these sections could work as Web Parts, or something like that.

Does any of this make sense Is it possible Are there are websites or examples that are out there that I could get an idea to see if this has been done and how to do it

Thank you.

-Gumbatman




Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

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Gumbatman wrote:

For example, there would be sections of reports (Headcounts, Turnover, etc.) and in each section there would be measurements they could click to include. So I could select the Headcounts section and select the measurements such as Terminations, Hires, and Period End Headcount. I may not select the Turnover sections at all.

Yea, just use links to the reports in your front-end. Develop the front-end to pass parameters if needed. I'm not so sure why this seems difficult







Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

Gumbatman

GR€g¡ìQL,

Thanks for the response. Generally I don't think it is that difficult. I was more looking for something that had been done so I could get a running start.

Also, what I am thinking is a sort of a dumbed-down version of Report Builder for the users. I know that seems silly, but you don't know the group I am dealing with .







Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

BobP - BIM

We are doing the same thing, using IFrames with the report displayed in the IFrame. We did some custom code to facilitate the moving around of the frames within a page.

This really would not be 1 report, but a web page with multiple reports being displayed in multiple IFrames.

HtH

BobP






Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

kcon

We are doing something similar using the reportviewer in local mode and dynamically appending subreports togther. We allow the user to select different sections which coorespond to different sub reports. The subreports themselves can be altered to an extent in that report columns are named generically and then data columns are aliased to the generic columns in the SQL. For instance a section may have columns col1-col5. The user picks actual columns such as quantity or unitprice and then we dynamically construct the sql to alias the real columns to the report columns. In the end it appears as one report, fairly customizable and fairly easy to construct for the user.




Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

Gumbatman

kcon,

It appears that you are doing what we are thinking about. Can you give me a little (just a little) more specific information about what you are doing It is just so we don't have to start from scratch. Or do you know of a website, book, that may give me a little more information about good design when creating this sort of page.

Thank you.

-Gumbatman





Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

kcon

Gumbatman,

The things you will get into are;

using reportviewer in local mode

loading RDLs via data streams

passing datasets to subreports

parsing XML

dyamic SQL

The site www.gotreportviewer.com has examples for the first three items.

For parsing XML check out MSDN for articles of XMLPathNavigator, XMLTextreader, XMLtextwriter classes. You may find times where it's easier to convert the stream to a string and use either regular expressions or standard string functions to manipulate the RDL so you should search for arcticle on converting streams to string and the reverse.

As for dynamic SQL portion (that would be where you alias real columns to report columns) there are a few ways to do that. What we do is simply create a stored procedure based on the users selections of columns. Since we are running in local mode we have to supply the dataset dynamcially anyways.

If its not already obvious you will need to understand how the RDL is constructed. I know this is documented somewhere in MSDN and perhaps another poster can supply you a link. It's not overly complicated and you can probably figure it out just looking at it since most of the tags are logical.

This approach will take some effort up front but once you get it packaged into reusable functions or classes it will be fairly easy to expand on. The upside to this approach is that alot of the unfixable bugs with RS rendering that you read in this forum can be overcome by dynamic altering of the RDL.

Good luck.





Re: Making Reports Customizeable for Users on a .NET site

Gumbatman

kcon,

Thanks for all the great and very detailed information.

This is a great help and will save me tons of time.

I really appreciate it.

-Gumbatman