Integrate Access report

Question

How can I integrate Reports done in Microsoft Access in my WPF application?

Answer 1

You'll have to define a little bit more what you mean by integration.

You are talking about a desktop application like word or PowerPoint or in this case Access. You can certainly automate or use Access as a com object and have access reports output their results as RFT or likey even better as a PDF document. So, it not clear when you speak of integration is really much centered around how you going to prompt the user for those report paramters and ask the user for filtering etc. So, choices you have range from a simple nightly batch job that runs and creates a bunch of PDF files on the users desktop and then are copied to a server, or perhaps even FTP up to the server.

Perhaps you talking about something a little bit tighter here?

So I'm not really sure if your questions any different than how would you integrate some PDF documents, or PowerPoint presentation, or in this case some Access reports. They are all the same concept and your question not really different then asking how to do this with power point.

However keep in mind that for Access 2010, there is WEB based reporting now. Those web reports actually use behind the scene are fully built around SQL server reporting services. In this case, the data will reside on SharePoint, but the WEB report side of Access are WPF presentation compatible reports since they are web based and run using sql server reporting services (they are RDL reports).

On the other hand if you're not really using Access in this case. You might as well just use the web based SQL server reporting service then. So do keep in mind that the web based reports Access uses for access 2010 is/are based on SQL server reporting services and it's actually creating RDL compatible reports.

However if you're not talking about the web based edition of access available in for 2010, then you're back to any old desktop program like excel are word or PDF documents or in this case Access. So, there's nothing different here about any old desktop program in windows and Access is one of those programs (sans the new weeb stuff for 2010).

So, the approach (or shall I say challenge) to getting that data into your presentation layer is not really a specific question to access alone, but is really much like a asking how can you have the output of your PowerPoint presentation brought into WPF.

You likely be best to have the report's render its output as PDF, or perhaps the XPS document writer is a sutiable output. So, your code take it from that point onwards for printing or display. So if you have the means to display a PDF or XPS doc, now then this would be a possible road to go down.