When to use RDLC over RDL reports?

Question

From my experience there are few things to think about both things:

I. RDL reports are HOSTED reports generally. This means you need to implement SSRS Server. They are a built in extension of Visual Studio from SQL Server for the reporting language. When you install SSRS you should have an add on called 'Business Intelligence Development Studio' which is much easier to work with the reports than without it.

R eport

D efinition

L angauge

Benefits of RDL reports:

1. You can host the reports in an environment that has services running for you on them.
2. You can configure security on an item or inheriting level to handle security as a standalone concept
3. You can configure the service to send out emails(provided you have an SMTP server you have access to) and save files on schedules
4. You have a database generally called 'ReportServer' you can query for info on the reports once published.
5. You can access these reports still through 'ReportViewer' in a client application written in ASP.NET, WPF (with a winform control bleh!), or Winforms in .NET using 'ProcessingMode.Remote'.
6. You can set parameters a user can see and use to gain more flexibility.
7. You can configure parts of a report to be used for connection strings as 'Data Sources' as well as a sql query, xml, or other datasets as a 'Dataset'. These parts and others can be stored and configured to cache data on a regular basis.
8. You can write .NET proxy classes of the services http:// /ReportServer/ReportingService2010 or /ReportExecution2005. You can then make up your OWN methods in .NET for emailing, saving, or manipulating SSRS data from the service directly of a Server hosting SSRS reports in code. Programmatically Export SSRS report from sharepoint using ReportService2010.asmx

Downsides:

1. SSRS is kind of wonkey compared to other things on getting it up fast. Most people get confused by the security policy and designing reports as an 'add on' to VS. SQL 2005 = VS BIDS 2005 , SQL 2008 = VS BIDS 2008, SQL 2012 = VS BIDS 2010(LOL).
2. Continuing on 1 the policy for security settings IMHO are idiotically overcomplex. There is server security, database security and roles, two security settings on the page hosted for the service. Most people only set up an admin than can't get in and wonder why other users cannot. Most common complaint or question on SSRS is related to getting in generally from my experience.
3. You can use 'expressions' that will supposeduly 'enhance' your report. Often times you do more than a few and your report goes to a crawl in performance.
4. You have a set amount of things you can do and export to. SSRS has no hover over reporting I know of without a javascript hack.
5. Speed and performance can take a hit as the stupid SSRS config recycles the system and a first report can take a while at times just loading the site. You can get around this by altering it but I have found making a keep alive service for it works better.

II. RDLC reports are CLIENT CONTAINED reports that are NOT HOSTED ANYWHERE. The extra c in the name means 'Client'. Generally this is an extension of the RDL language meant for use only in Visual Studio Client Applications. It exists in Visual Studio when you add a 'reporting' item.

Benefits of RDLC reports:

1. You can hookup a wcf service much much much more easier to the dataset.
2. You have more control over the dataset and can use POCO classes filled with Entity framework objects or ADO.NET directly as well as tables themselves. You can monkey with the data for optimization it before binding it to the report.
3. You can customize the look more with add on's directly in code behind.

Downsides:

1. You need to handle parameters on your own and while you can implement wrapper methods to help the legwork is a little more than expected and unfortunate.
2. The user cannot SEE the parameters in a 'ReportViewer' control unless it is in remote mode and accessing an RLD report. Thus you need to make textboxes, dropdowns, radio buttons on your own outside the control to pass to it. Some people like this added control, I do not personally.
3. Anything you want to do with servicing the reports for distribution you need to build yourself. Emailing, subscriptions, saving. Sorry you need to build that in .NET or else implement a proxy that already does that from above you could just be getting using hosted reports.

Honestly I like both for different purposes. If I want something to go out to analysts that they use all the time and tweak for graphs, charts, drill downs and exports to Excel I use RDL and just have SSRS's site do all the legwork of handling the email distributions. If I want an application that has a report section and I know that application is it's own module with rules and governance I use an RDLC and having the parameters be smaller and be driven by the decisions the user made before getting to the report part of what client they are on and site and then they usually just choose a time frame or type and nothing more. So generally a complex report I would use RDL and for something simple I would use RDLC IMHO.

I hope that helps.

Q: What is the difference between RDL and RDLC formats?

A: RDL files are created by the SQL Server 2005 version of Report Designer. RDLC files are created by the Visual Studio 2008 version of Report Designer.

RDL and RDLC formats have the same XML schema. However, in RDLC files, some values (such as query text) are allowed to be empty, which means that they are not immediately ready to be published to a Report Server. The missing values can be entered by opening the RDLC file using the SQL Server 2005 version of Report Designer. (You have to rename .rdlc to .rdl first.)

RDL files are fully compatible with the ReportViewer control runtime. However, RDL files do not contain some information that the design-time of the ReportViewer control depends on for automatically generating data-binding code. By manually binding data, RDL files can be used in the ReportViewer control. New! See also the RDL Viewer sample program.

Note that the ReportViewer control does not contain any logic for connecting to databases or executing queries. By separating out such logic, the ReportViewer has been made compatible with all data sources, including non-database data sources. However this means that when an RDL file is used by the ReportViewer control, the SQL related information in the RDL file is simply ignored by the control. It is the host application's responsibility to connect to databases, execute queries and supply data to the ReportViewer control in the form of ADO.NET DataTables.

http://www.gotreportviewer.com/

I have always thought the different between RDL and RDLC is that RDL are used for SQL Server Reporting Services and RDLC are used in Visual Studio for client side reporting. The implemenation and editor are almost identical. RDL stands for Report Defintion Language and RDLC Report Definition Language Client-side.

I hope that helps.

From my experience, if you need high performance (this does depend slightly on your client specs) on large reports, go with rdlc. Additionally, rdlc reports give you a very full range of control over your data, you may be able to save yourself wasted database trips, etc. by using client side reports. On the project I'm currently working on, a critical report requires about 2 minutes to render on the server side, and pretty much takes out whichever reporting server it hits for that time. Switching it to client side rendering, we see performance much closer to 20-40 seconds with no load on the report server and less bandwidth used because only the datasets are being downloaded.

Your mileage may vary, and I find rdlc's add development and maintenance complexity, especially when your report has been designed as a server side report.

Some of these points have been addressed above, but here's my 2-cents for VS2008 environment.

RDL (Remote reports): Much better development experience, more flexibility if you need to use some advanced features like scheduling, ad-hoc reporting, etc...

RDLC (Local reports): Better control over the data before sending it to the report (easier to validate or manipulate the data prior to sending it to the report). Much easier deployment, no need for an instance of Reporting Services.

One HUGE caveat with local reports is a known memory leak that can severely affect performance if your clients will be running numerous large reports. This is supposed to be addressed with the new VS2010 version of the report viewer.

In my case, since we have an instance of Reporting Services available, I develop new reports as RDLs and then convert them to local reports (which is easy) and deploy them as local reports.