Chapter 17. Extending Reporting Services
As you learned in Chapter 2, Reporting Services is a robust and scalable product for enterprise report processing. In addition, Microsoft has created Reporting Services using a modular extensible architecture that gives users the ability to customize, extend, and expand the product to support their enterprise business intelligence (BI) reporting needs. This chapter introduces you to most of the areas within Reporting Services that allow customization and some of the reasons that you may wish to extend the product. The basic requirements for implementing each type of extension are discussed, followed by a detailed example of creating and deploying a data processing extension.
In this chapter, you will learn about the extensibility of Reporting Services and the areas that currently support customization. These include:
Extensibility options
Reasons for extending SQL Server Reporting Services
How to create custom extensions
How to install custom extensions
Reporting Services currently supports extending its behavior in the following areas:
Data Processing Extensions (DPEs)—Custom DPEs enable you to access any type of data using a consistent programming model. This option is for you if you cannot access your data using one of the currently supported providers (Analysis Services, Hyperion Essbase, ODBC, OLE DB, Oracle, Report Model, SAP BI NetWeaver, SQL Server, and XML). Microsoft has also released a Feature Pack for SQL Server that provides customized ...
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