Alternative to Report Viewer for SQL Reporting Services

Question

We're looking to develop an upgrade to our existing ASP.NET application in MVC3. Our current app is IE only based and the upgrade will be browser neutral, i.e. it must work in IE8+, firefox, chrome and safari.

The main issue we have is that we have a number of reports based on SQL Reporting Services 2008 R2 and we use the Report Viewer 2010 control.

We don't really want to use this going forward because:

• It's buggy (for example, we can't use the SP1 version as renders HTML sometimes that breaks our site)
• It's got issues with non IE browsers (e.g. the IterationId missing on URL bug)
• It's based on Viewstate
• It's hard to localise some of the rendered output of the control

I'd really like to replace it with an alternative (even if its viewstate based and we have to hack in a solution with MVC) but I've not been able to find one. Is there an alternative control out there that renders Reporting Services reports? It's the viewer we want to replace, not RS.

Answer 1

We wanted to integrate SSRS with out existing website but didn't want to use the SSRS UI (since it's very much it's own website) and we didn't want to uses the Report View Controls (although we have an ASP.NET Website, the report viewer controls have limited options for making it do what you want). The solution that worked for us was:

1. Call the SSRS Web Service to return a list of Reports, and drop the values into a Drop Down List.

2. Read the report path from the Drop Down List and get the SSRS Web Service that returns the parameters of the selected report.

3. Build input controls based on what came back in #2.

4. Users supply the input values and submit the form.

5. The page passes the values to the SSRS Web Service and gets back a PDF, Excel, Word document based on what the user requested.

This wasn't all that hard (it took < 40-hours to code & test) and works really well. The biggest issue we have is supporting different versions of the SSRS Web Service as you move from one version of SSRS to another.

I'm guessing if you wanted to output the reports as HTML and pump that to the UI, you could do that too.

Obviously if you want to all users to edit report properties, create subscriptions, etc -- you'll have additional work to do.