Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

Chapter 22

Extending Reporting Services

What's in this chapter?

Leveraging extensibility options

Reasons for extending SQL Server Reporting Services

Creating custom extensions

Installing custom extensions

As you learned in previous chapters, 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 allows users 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 explains some of the reasons that you might want 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.

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 Business Intelligence, SQL Server, Teradata, SQL Azure, Parallel Data Warehouse, SharePoint List, and XML). Microsoft has also released a Feature Pack for SQL Server that provides customized extensions, ...