Potential Solutions for Implementing Reporting

There are a number of ways to implement reporting in Silverlight applications, each with its pros and cons, including the following:

  • Using Silverlight printing functionality
  • Generating a PDF
  • Generating HTML
  • Generating Office documents

The following sections explore each of the preceding possibilities.

Using Silverlight's Printing Functionality

The introduction of printing in Silverlight 4 allowed you to print an object hierarchy, such as what's displayed on a screen. Unfortunately, it only supported sending the output to the printer as a bitmap, rather than using a vector-based output, resulting in low print quality and large files being sent to the printer. This made it suitable only for printing ...

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