Calling a .Net Assembly from a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report?

Question

I've currently got a set of reports with a number of common functions sitting in code blocks within the .rdl files. This obviously presents a maintainability issue and I as wondering if anyone knew a way for these different reports to share a library of common code?

Ideally I'd like to have a .Net Assembly attached to my Reporting Services project, which all of my reports can access and call functions from. This would save the headache of trying to update and redeploy about 100 reports every time a change needs to be made to a common function.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

From within Visual Studio in the properties of the report, on the 'References' tab add the details for the assembly that contains the managed code. This code can be called from expressions within reports using the instance name that is specified.

This assembly can either be stored in the GAC or the PrivateAssemblies directory of Visual Studio, and be deployed to the Report Service 'bin' directory on the Reporting Services server. For more information refer to How to use custom assemblies or embedded code in Reporting Services