Comments on: Refreshing Reports using URL access in Reporting Services

By: Thomas Trung Vo

Thomas Trung Vo — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:31:57 +0000

Make Report by Reporting Service with SharePoint List http://sharepointtaskmaster.blogspot.com/2011/08/make-report-by-reporting-service-with.html

By: Garry

Garry — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:35:25 +0000

You could have also made a simple form which, on submission, calls the Reporting Services web service using your form variables as parameters, then use your app to display the returning HTML 4.01 (or PDF or RTF or whatever you want). It’s a SOAP payload so you can send up whatever you want (well, within the web server’s set limits, of course).

By: Daniel O

Daniel O — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:09:13 +0000

True, but then you have to commit it to provide preview access and clean it up if the user cancels out of the letter generation wizard or closes the window.

The real solution would have been if the customer let us have SQL 2008 RS, then we’d just render it to word with the basic details from the DB, and then the user edits in the body of the letter directly in word.

By: Garry

Garry — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:39:23 +0000

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a form that stores the stuff in an intermediate table and then just give it the ID of the letter you want to display in the report?

By: Daniel O

Daniel O — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:05:21 +0000

Yes, we ended up implementing a form POST to address the limit. The reports being generated were letters, so the users would type in several paragraphs of text.

By: Garry

Garry — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:39:37 +0000

These are fairly simple reports. In fact, I’m using the logged in user to drive most of them so the only real parameter is my random parameter.

Out of interest, why are you passing in over 1500 characters worth of parameters? That sounds like a lot, even for a complex report.

It would also be interesting to see if you can do a POST (and therefore get around the character limit). Not exactly RESTful, but it might get you out of a jam.

By: Daniel O

Daniel O — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:18:28 +0000

One limitation we found from using the URL to pass in parameters is if you are passing in a large section of text (say over 1500 characters) you start to hit the limit of what can but on on a URL.