Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

10.1. The Out-of-the-Box UI Experience

The out-of-the-box UI experience in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is rich enough that some organizations do not even need to apply any customizations to the core platform. Unfortunately, many report developers overlook this platform and its capabilities, so this section focuses on the out-of-the-box experience and how to build BI solutions on top of it.

In this section, you will explore some of the key aspects of displaying your reports using what is already shipped with Reporting Services configured in SharePoint integrated mode. In particular, you will learn practical solutions using real-world examples to illustrate the possibilities of combining SharePoint and Reporting Services functionality to provide a better user experience for the BI solutions you build and deploy to your SharePoint sites.

10.1.1. Redirecting to the RSViewerPage.aspx Page

When you publish report definitions (.rdl) to a SharePoint library and select a report, it automatically opens a page (RSViewerPage.aspx) in the ReportServer folder in the _layouts system directory, so reports can be viewed within a Report Viewer Web Part embedded in that page. This redirection behavior is due to the fact that after you configure Reporting Services to operate in integrated mode, the appropriate .rdl extension association is defined at the SharePoint farm level. This gives the WSS runtime engine an understanding of how to treat files with the .rdl extension.

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