Why use ReportView?

Question

Reporting is pretty new to me. I see that VS provides some Reporting controls that provides a wizard to help creating the report. My question is, if I already have stored procedures that generate the report data, what is the difference between presenting it through a reportview or gridview? Is there obvious advantage that reportview control provides that other grid controls don't?

Answer 1

You can use ReportViewer controls to display reports generated with Sql Server Reporting Services. So if you wanted to have a report that included charts or graphics, you could create it and host it in SSRS and then include it right in your application.

A grid view can only display data in a grid. The report viewer has the capability to format data in much more sophisticated ways.

Answer 2

ReportViewer in local mode (RDLC) has a lot of additional functionality

• ReportViewer can do multiple tables, graphs and non-table data
• ReportViewer can paginate and print data
• ReportViewer has capabilities to export the report into Excel, PDF etc.