10.4. Displaying Your Reports Your Way

Earlier, you looked at the out-of-the-box options for incorporating reports in your SharePoint site pages. First, you looked at the out-of-the-box redirection to the RSViewerPage.aspx page when you click a report definition file. Second, you learned how a Report Viewer Web Part can be dragged and dropped onto a site page and further customized to meet an organization's reporting needs.

Having reports rendered on the SharePoint site pages and leveraging the innate ability of page customization works very well for many customers, but there are a number of scenarios in which customers simply don't want this level of customization. Instead, they want to have more control over the report rendition UI. Some other customers would like to have a single entry (or single version) to a specific page that contains their reports along with other content that is deployed once and shared among all sites across the farm and cannot be customized on a site-by-site basis. From here toward the end of the chapter, you will learn how to display reports your own way. You will start with lighter approaches, but later, you will see more customized solutions for rendering the reports onto your SharePoint pages.

NOTE

Most of the examples demonstrated throughout the remainder of the chapter are created using Visual Studio extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (also referred to as VSeWSS in this book). VSeWSS is a tool for rapidly developing custom SharePoint ...

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