Enhance Reporting Services By Including A Function Library
First we write a .Net function library called: It contains "Public Class BodilyFunctions ...", and: 'BodilyFunctions' includes a Function called "Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It" Now let's get our Reporting Services Report to use the 'Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It' function!
Copy DirtyThings.Dll into the Report Designer folder on our machine. This ensures that "Preview" will work while you are developing the report.
(The default location of the Report Designer is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Report Designer) Copy DirtyThings.Dll onto the Server. It goes in the Report Directory Server, the default location of which is C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\ReportServer\bin.
Tell your Report to use the DirtyThings.Dll. How do we do this? In your Reporting Services Report:
- Go to the Report Properties dialog (Report Menu | Report Properties, or right-click the background of the report layout and choose 'Properties')
In the References tab: Click the ellipsis buttons next to the 'References' listbox(i.e., the button with three dots on it) Use 'Browse' to find the 'DirtyThings.Dll' file. Click OK. In the "Classes" list box, type "DirtyThings.BodilyFunctions" in the Class Name column. ('DirtyThings' is the namespace of our class, and bodily functions is the class we want to instantiate.) Put "oBodilyFunctions" in the "Instance Name" column, this is the object we'll be using in our expressions. Click OK and close the Report Properties dialog
Now we can access our functions from any expression in the report, by typing:
=Code.oBodilyFunctions.Pick_Your_Nose_And_Eat_It() (Or in a more general sense: 'Code.{instance Name}.{function name}' )
Oh yeh, those boring losers at msdn have also written up how it's done, in their article Deploying a Custom Assembly
'adam' on Mon, 04 Apr 2005 00:46:40 GMT, sez: ok, so I'd really like to be able to insert files from the file system (not the DB!!) into my report - would this method allow me to do that?
'secretGeek' on Mon, 04 Apr 2005 01:02:54 GMT, sez: If these 'files' are csv, excel or xml files then you can access them directly from reporting services, if you treat them as a data-source and you configure (for example) an ODBC connection to them.
If you're wanting to create hyperlinks to them instead, you can do this using an "action" on your report items.
If they are html and you want to render this html out to the browser, for example, then you'll need to write a "custom renderer" -- so go and look that up. (There was an article about this at MSDN recently, too, written by James Yip.)
But if you have something trickier to do then, yes, a custom assembly may be required.
Your custom assembly won't automatically be permitted to touch external resources, (such as files) because this is a security risk.
So you'll need to grant the custom assembly the necessary permissions. See Understanding Code Access Security in Reporting Services (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/rsprog/htm/rsp_prog_extend_install_25ia.asp)
best of luck
'secretGeek' on Mon, 04 Apr 2005 01:05:33 GMT, sez: Also, you might want to instead import the content of the 'files' you want to report on into your database, so that they can't be moved or changed.
'Lee Everest' on Mon, 12 Feb 2007 17:39:01 GMT, sez: Sweet. Thanks for the info!
'http://' on Thu, 24 May 2007 06:43:43 GMT, sez: <>
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