Use Reporting Services to print SharePoint lists?
Has anyone found a way to have SQL Server Reporting Services dynamically generate reports of SharePoint 2007 lists based on the onscreen filtering/sorting and the underlying SharePoint View (columns, groupings)?
We like the flexibility to give power users a way to set up their own custom views of SharePoint lists but we need to find a way to let them produce reports based on their views.
Unfortunately, our users still have a requirement to generate professional looking paper reports. The print capabilities of IE7, although much improved over IE6, are still not good enough for reports that are sent outside of our company. Specifically missing from IE7 are customization of page headers/footers (for company names/logos); and the abillity to save the configurations done within the IE7 print preview window.
Did you try exploring the database? For simple lists I use it all the time, I am not sure how you go about capturing the context.
You might also explore using SOAP and XSLT, you could make the query based on the page, then format it any way you like.
We couldn't find any easy way out, so we're creating our own solution which writes an .rdl file based on the current list and view to the wss site's report library, then starts SSRS with the .rdl file as input. Wish we didn't have to do this, but it seems like the only option. The solution is invoked through a "PrintView" option we added to the Action menu.
this might be well-known already, but you guys tried the report part provided by WSS 2.0 to be used WSS 3? see
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159772.aspx , this is how you could show it in your sharepoint site. But can you guys tell me how you use the sharepoint list data in your report except directly reading from database? Cheers.
Gerry,
Can you poist a sample of an RDL file that you are generating...Unfortunately, this is a problem many (if not all) of us folks deploying SharePoint (and MOSS) are dealing with. I had hopes that the SP2 release of SQL Reporting Services would help us, but sadly no.
If you can't post a good sample, I can send you my e-mail.
Thanks for your help,
Dave C
I have looked into this software at their website. Does it give you the ability to have a print me function from the list for users? That was the most intriguing thing about the earlier post. We have lots of sharepoint lists and users want to go and create a print friendly view that doesn't require IE7. It appears the software you linked to just gives you new options within Visual studio report designer. And it also looks like you must create xml queries to put in (ie, it doesn't have a query builder).
I am using this to create SQL Server Reporting Services reports based on SharePoint lists. By creating SSRS reports based on SharePoint lists, I can create reports in HTML/PDF/Excel, with company logo and other info in headers/footer. Using SSRS, I can print from HTML or PDF and have consistent results.
There is no query builder for using this extension, but they provide plenty of examples on what to do.
