Reporting Services Features

My project manager is all gun-ho on using reporting services to handle the
reporting in our new project. I have been asked to research these services
and see how they will fit in. We have always used Crystal Reports, so I am
looking to see that Reporting Services can handle our needs the way Crystal
did. Any comments on the following questions would be greatly appreciated.
1. If I built, dynamically, in my code a dataset, can I use it as the data
source for a report. Most of our reports can not be straight queries from
the database, due to complexity of the data structure.
2. Is there any way for me to pass a string to the report from the code?
Thanks!You have a few ways to develop. Note that RS is not Crystal Reports and to
take advantage of its features you need to be sure to understand the
capabilities. That being said there is what can be done today and what will
be possible with V2.
Today you can not out of the box pass a dataset to RS. You would have to
write a data processing extension. Doable but non-trivial. My suggestion
with the current version is to put your logic in stored procedure. V2 (Yukon
and Widbey) will ship with two controls. A webform control and a winform
control. You should be able to pass it the dataset as you would like to do.
If integrating from your own web page (versus using the portal that ships
with RS) you can either use URL integration or you can integrate using web
services. Either way it is trivial to pass a string to the report.
Bruce Loehle-Conger
MVP SQL Server Reporting Services
"LHI Developer" <LHIDeveloper@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:2A93DF6A-A661-435B-A7C4-AA59309F5874@.microsoft.com...
> My project manager is all gun-ho on using reporting services to handle the
> reporting in our new project. I have been asked to research these
services
> and see how they will fit in. We have always used Crystal Reports, so I
am
> looking to see that Reporting Services can handle our needs the way
Crystal
> did. Any comments on the following questions would be greatly
appreciated.
> 1. If I built, dynamically, in my code a dataset, can I use it as the
data
> source for a report. Most of our reports can not be straight queries from
> the database, due to complexity of the data structure.
> 2. Is there any way for me to pass a string to the report from the code?
> Thanks!