Local reporting options in a Disconnected environment?

Question

What are my options to allow local reporting in my environment? I have an existing central reporting services already working that they access through the web. I now need to offer those same reports on there local machine.

What are the local reporting options? Each local machine has SQL Express 2005 running on it. Would I have to replicate the ReportServer DB's as well then?

Is there another way? Would it be easier to just generate them a different way to avoid messing with 200 install's of reporting services? The existing reports are your basic grab the data from the DB reports. Nothing fancy.

Answer 1

You can run the ReportViewer control in Local Processing mode. In order to do this, in your environment, you will definately need the following two things:

1 - Report definition files (RDLC files) that will build the reports.

2 - Data to display in the reports.

You already have #1, you just need to package it somewhere in a local repository. The ReportViewer control needs to be able to access this. Be it a WebControl or a Winform control, they will both require RDLC files in order to create the reports.

As for the DATA, you will need to figure out how you will be replicating from the Database onto user machines. One idea would be to generate XML files with the data, then read the XML into a Dataset and pass it to the reportViewer control.