Question

We have a requirement to use WCF as a data source in our reports. [Server Mode]

Dot Net 4.0/ SSRS 2008 R2/ ASP.Net 4.0

The idea behind this is to apply common business rules throughout the application from Reports to standard application grids.

Essentially it would work along the lines of

Normally its as follows

[RDL – SQL Sever Data Provider – DB]

but what we require is

[RDL – XML/Custom Dataprovider – WCF Method – Business Layer – – DB]

Our main app would use the WCF layer also.
Actually for practical purposes its an interface layer so if we had to use Web Services for SSRS instead, it would be considered if there were advantages to this approach.

I have found some articles on our approach

http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2008/02/21/using-wcf-endpoints-with-sql-reporting-services.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/37270/Consuming-a-WCF-Service-from-an-SSRS-RDL-Server-Re

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/thread/aa0c8c5e-28a7-440f-a1c1-62e8bb184b8d/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms154655(v=sql.105).aspx

http://devblog.bardoloi.com/2011/09/using-wcf-web-services-as-data-source.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa964129(SQL.90).aspx

Either way given the limitations here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa964129(SQL.90).aspx#repservxmlds_topic5
its all getting a little scary.

What I do not want to do of course is go down a certain path and this then impacts report design capability, performance and possibly limits the types of reports that can be created.

If anyone has any opinions or experience on the above layout I would appreciate greatly your views and input.

I’m also very much open to possible alternatives in how we could create reports containing data which has been though a business layer that does the appropriate massaging of data etc

Apologies for the long post.

Liam

Answer 1

I’m contemplating the same situation right now. It’s been a while since this questions was asked but I’ll add this for anyone who’s interested in this scenario.

So far it’s not worth the effort, getting SSRS to interact with our WCF service takes too long and has several restrictions, most of them are outlined in the links you provided.

Here are the two alternatives I’m now contemplating

1. Call the service before the report and pass the output as a parameter (the report has to parse the XML which is another issue)
2. Call the service and convert its output to a more tabular format (after all the dataset is a table) convert to XML and send it to the report as a parameter (also need to be parsed but it could be easier than the original output as is in our case)
3. Create a custom dataset extension that is more suitable to handle WCF calls and gives you greater control over the process.

All in all, I’m in a tight spot regarding this issue since there’s no easy way to acomplish this out of the box.

Hope this helps anyone!