How can you omit the logon to MS Reporting Services?

Question

Hi Folks,

at work we have a web-based PHP-application which acts as the single UI that grants access to certain modules to users based on their access rights (neighter windows-logon nor ldap).

For one of the modules we now want to show reports using the MS Reporting Services embedded in our UI. We don't want the user to have another login and password for this so we thought of passing a username to the reporting service and thereby omit the login. We couldn't find any information on how to do this... What did we miss?

Is there a way to pass logon information to the service? Via GET? Via POST? Anything?

Best Regards,

Cassy

Answer 1

You should be able to look at the URL Access features of reporting services and that should allow you to perform whatever actions you need.

Answer 2

Hi

You could setup your reporting services in such a way that it would allow anonymous connections. I am guessing that being a PHP system, that you a) Don’t have Active Directory b) Use your own security mechanism. You can request reports from the server, and in that process impersonate a user, but it sounds like you would rather want to use anonymous?

I personally would be careful. But I am sure you have considered the implications. If you would like more information on how to get reporting server running, and serving up pages to anonymous users, I could outline the process that I have used before.

If the users are on a Active Directory Domain, and the browsers are under the control of Group Policy’s you could setup that zone, to automatically pass the windows credentials, then it is only a matter of configuring your report server to give access to all of users. This would least amount of effort and I think the safest approach.

Hope it helps