Creating a PDF of a Dynamics CRM 4.0 report programmatically

Question

We are currently in the midst of upgrading our CRM 3.0 installation to CRM 4.0.

One of the things we were doing from our external web site is pulling a PDF of a report using the ReportViewer control and then doing a ReportViewer.ServerReport.Render().

From what I've gathered, this doesn't work anymore, because anything I try to do fails, mostly with rsReportParameterProcessingError and rsCredentialsNotSpecified.

I suspect this is because 4.0 uses the CRM Data Connector to get around Kerberos trust for delegation.

So, All I want is a PDF of a CRM report, that I can get programmatically. Anyone ever tried this?

Answer 1

Our solution was to copy the specific reports from CRM's 4.0 folder to another folder on the Report Server, and use them from there using standard SQL Server connection strings..

We only have 4 reports that we needed, so the duplication was bearable.

Edit: I finally found the official answer. In CRM 4.0 there is an Action when editing the report entity, called "Publish Report for External Use". This basically does exactly what I did above. I am not the official Reports guy, so I did not think to go look at this form in CRM.

But, there you have it, now I can say I found an official answer.