Display Your Data Your Way With Custom Renderers for Reporting Services

摘要

SQL Server~(TM) 2005 Reporting Services from Microsoft is a great tool that offers a centralized approach to storing and rendering reports. It also allows users to view and download reports without installing additional software. But what's most convenient for users is that reports can be saved in any number of different formats using custom report renderers. In this article, I will demonstrate how to develop one such report renderer that outputs HTML reports, but the skills you'll learn can easily be used to create a renderer for Microsoft~(~R) Word documents or any other format of your choosing. SQL Server 2005 includes many new features and enhancements. These include support for stored procedures written in managed code, user defined functions, and managed user-defined data type (UDT) support, which provides flexibility and reduces the need for data type conversion when reading and saving data to and from the database. As you will see, these particular features will come in handy when you build your custom report renderer.