I need to update a software which uploads existing PDF reports on Force.com to upload on Azure’s cloud instead. I’m a perfect beginner with Windows Azure.
On Force.com we could create users and give them different rights to manage the reports. I was wondering if I could find the same thing in Windows Azure.
Then I discovered the “SQL Azure Reporting”. I added a Reporting Server on my Azure portal to give it a try. It looks like it’s close to what I need. The thing is I can only upload RDL files.
What I need to do :
- create users ;
- manage the permissions ;
- upload/download pdf files from code according to user rights.
Is there a way I could use SQL Azure Reporting to handle my PDF files somehow, or should I start over using Blobs storage and create my own user management system?
I don’t believe you can upload pre-generated PDFs into SQL Server Reporting Services so I think you will need to use blobs and manage your own users.
To be honest, storing PDFs in blob storage and providing them to users through, say, an MVC app, is very easy. Of course, if you have to build a whole user management system just to be able to serve up pre-generated PDF files then that is a bit of a pain.
We have recently started using SSRS on Azure and we use it in two ways; We have power users who can log directly into SSRS and run reports. And we use the REST service from our web application to pull down PDF reports on behalf of users and then just give them the PDF. We use a single SSRS login for those kind of request and we manage in our application what data individual users can see, by passing different parameters to SSRS.