ReportViewer Controls (Visual Studio)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 includes report design functionality and ReportViewer controls so that you can add full-featured reports to custom applications. Reports may contain tabular, aggregated, and multidimensional data. ReportViewer controls are provided so that you can process and display the report in your application. There are two versions of the control. The ReportViewer Web server control is used to host reports in ASP.NET projects. The ReportViewer Windows Forms control is used to host reports in Windows application projects.

Both controls can be configured to run in local processing mode or remote processing mode. How you configure the processing mode affects everything about the report from design to deployment.

• Local processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by the ReportViewer control in the client application. All report processing is performed as a local process using data that your application provides. To create the reports used in local processing mode, you use the Report project template in Visual Studio. For more information, see Configuring ReportViewer for Local Processing.

• Remote processing mode refers to report processing that is performed by a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services report server. In remote processing mode, the ReportViewer control is used as a viewer to display a predefined report that is already published on a Reporting Services report server. All processing from data retrieval to report rendering is performed on the report server. To use remote processing mode, you must have a licensed copy of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. For more information, see Configuring ReportViewer for Remote Processing.

To use a ReportViewer control in your application, you must know how to add the control to your project form or Web page, configure the control to use a local report definition or server report, update data source references, and test and deploy the reports and control in your application. Walkthroughs are provided to help you learn these core skills. For more information, see Samples and Walkthroughs.

In This Section

• ReportViewer Web Server and Windows Forms Controls
  Introduces the ReportViewer controls and compares the differences between the Web server control and Windows Forms control.

• Adding and Configuring the ReportViewer Controls
  Explains how to add the controls and the reports to an application, configure a control to perform local or remote processing, and set control properties. This section also includes information about ReportViewer runtime functionality such as report navigation, search, export, and printing.

• Creating Client Report Definition (.rdlc) Files
  Explains how to create a report that runs in local processing mode.

• Deploying Reports and ReportViewer Controls
  Describes the steps and requirements of a ReportViewer deployment.

• Samples and Walkthroughs
  Provides step-by-step instruction on how to create reports and configure controls for a variety of scenarios.

• Report Designer User Interface Reference (Visual Studio)
  Contains F1 help topics for the report design tool used for creating reports that run in local processing mode. It also describes the ReportViewer toolbar that provides run-time functionality for deployed reports.

• Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms
  Managed reference documentation for the ReportViewer Web server control.

• Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms
  Managed reference documentation for the ReportViewer Windows Forms control.

Note

To get the most recent version of the documentation, use the online Help option, which gets up-to-date content from MSDN. The online version may include newer content not found in local Help. To use online Help and to learn more about it, search for "Help Sources: Local and Online Help" in the Visual Studio product documentation.

See Also

Concepts

Configuring ReportViewer for Local Processing
Configuring ReportViewer for Remote Processing