Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 5

Generating and Displaying a PDF Report

Let's now look at how you can use a common reporting tool to generate the reports as PDF files and display them within the application. We will use a reporting tool to generate the PDF and then display the report in the application, by overlaying an IFrame on the application when running inside the browser and using the WebBrowser control when running outside the browser.

Generating a Report on the Server

The first step is to generate the PDF reports on the server and make them available to the Silverlight client. Let's look at how you can go about implementing this.

Choosing a Reporting Tool/Engine

When implementing reports, you could take the path of manually creating the reports yourself, which is a time-consuming ...