Creating and managing annotations in SQL Server Reports

Question

Hi

I need to load SQL Server reports over the web and make it more interactive for a set of users by:

• Allowing them to put up their annotations/comments on different visualizations being shown.
• Track these annotations for each screen.

Is it possible with SSRS or any other visualization mechanism? Please let me know of any means to do it.

cheers

Answer 1

It sound like what you asking for is not SSRS as such: it's an interactive web page. by this I mean SSRS is output only, no data input.

So you want users to share comments on the

• latest report execution? SSRS will render with the latest data by default so what 2 users see on different screens a minute apart will be different. How do you matchreport data and comments?

• a specific execution? Look at report snapshots.

• the data in any report execution? See my idea below.

My solution for "comments on data"... which assumes annotations are persisted in the database with the report data...

The Report Viewer control in remote mode with an ASP.NET wrapper to deal with user input (annotations) might do the trick. The report would display annotations. In SSRS the screen = the report so this captures one requirement.