Is it possible to perform a web service call inside a reporting services report?

Question

Is it possible to perform a web service call inside a reporting services report? (i.e. use a WS call for a data source)

Answer 1

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa964129.aspx

This white paper will give you information on using both webservices and other XML based sources as a datasource for your reports.

Answer 2

This answer might be somehow off topic, but could still contain some useful information. :)

Yes, you can connect to a web service. I'm using that for feeding Reporting Services with data from a Web Service based ERP-system. The ERP-system is built on SQL Server and ASP.NET and are using SSRS for its reporting.

They have recently upgraded both the database as well as the reporting server to 2008 and since then I actually have had several problems with the web service based connection.

I don't know if it's just BIDS 2008 that are buggy, or if it is my automatically converted report projects from BIDS 2005 that are to blame, or if something is wrongly configured on the server side.

But for example I am not able to update the query fields in my datasets. I'm forced to manually add new query fields. I'm also not able to make a query with the query designer which were possible in BIDS 2005 on the Data tab (which I really miss in BIDS 2008 by the way).

There also seem to be alot of other things that doesn't really work as expected compared to the 2005 environment.

To be honest I haven't tried to build a new report from scratch, so that may solve some of my problems.

Though, the preview mode in BIDS 2008 and the published reports works great. :)