Professional Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 32Reporting

What's in This Chapter?

• Designing reports
• Generating reports
• Deploying reports

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/professionalvisualstudio2015 on the Download Code tab. The code and any related support files are located in their own folder for this chapter.

One of the key components of almost every business application is reporting. Businesses put data into the system to get useful information out of it, and this information is generally in the form of reports. Numerous reporting tools and engines are available, and it can often be hard to choose which one is best for your application or system. (They tend to work in different ways and have different pros and cons.)

Visual Studio 2015 contains a built-in report designer that saves to files using the RDL file specification — and reports built using this designer can be generated using the local report engine, or rendered on a remote report server running SQL Server Reporting Services.

Getting Started with Reporting

When you start designing reports, you want to either add a report to an existing project or start a completely new project (such as for a reporting application). If it is the latter, the easiest way to start is to create a new project using the Reports Application project template. This creates a Windows Forms project already set up with the necessary assembly references, a form with the Report Viewer control ...