My end goal is to open up a new browser window and display an animated progress gif whilst loading a slow Crystal Report. Using traditional asp.net methods to achieve this always results in the gif not animating during a postback, unless I use update panels but that's when things start getting messy.
I have read lots of articles describing how you can publish a Crystal Report as a web service using Visual Studio .net. This always relies on using the web service as the report source and binding a ReportViewer object to the data source/service.
I would like to do something a little different but I'm not sure its possible. I would like to build a asmx Service that returns the report just as HTML once its built. If this is possible, it will allow the loading of the report using Javascript AJAX methods. This would enable me to display a nice animated gif whilst the (sometimes slow) report is constructed.
I'm not sure how the report will behave though if generated in this way, would the stock navigation and export buttons still work?