Datasheet

Chapter 13 covers programmatic extensions to the Report Server. You will learn to write custom data
source, rendering, delivery, and security extensions. That chapter will show you how to build new fea-
tures on top of the Reporting Services architecture. As a report designer or business manager, you will
learn of these powerful capabilities, enabling you to address specialized requirements and to direct
application developers to develop custom extensions. As a system administrator, you will learn to
enable custom extensions and define appropriate security allowances to enable custom extensions to
run on your report server. As a custom extension developer, you will learn how to use the Reporting
Services object model to extend the features of reports and your server, to solve business problems and
enable advanced capabilities.
Summary
Different people will use Reporting Services in different ways. Our goal is to address the needs of the broad
community of power users, report designers, solution architects, system administrators, and business man-
agers. For some, the material contained in sections of this book will help them build and deploy reporting
solutions to meet their needs. For others, it may open their eyes to powerful capabilities beyond their skill-
set and to work alongside other professionals as educated members of a project team.
As a nonprogrammer report designer using Reporting Services, you are likely to learn to write some cus-
tom expressions and program functions to meet specific reporting needs. Perhaps this is as far as you
will need to take Reporting Services. For the vast majority, this is enough to design, build, and deploy
reports with capabilities far greater than any other reporting tools you may have used in the past. If you
are a serious programmer, then your needs are probably a little different from those of the casual report
designer. For the custom business solution developer, there are very few boundaries set by limitations of
this product. With some creativity and the techniques you will learn in the chapters ahead, you will take
reporting further than you have before and provide your users with real business intelligence rather
than just the ability to print out data.
Reporting Services takes data accessibility to the next level. Microsoft is making good on its promise of
making information available “any time, any place, and on any device.” Reports may be designed using
specific rendering formats and page sizes to support mobile devices, the browser window, Office docu-
ments, and — oh yes — the printed page.
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What Can You Do with Reporting Services?
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