Best Practice: Custom Front End for SSRS

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Best Practice: Custom Front End for SSRS

paul.murray

SSC Veteran

Points: 289
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March 17, 2013 at 3:52 pm

#291236

Hi All,
I am from a small software company that sells products exclusively for the mining industry. We have decided as a business that we need to have a new SSRS based reporting product (to supplement our existing Excel based one).
We have discovered fairly quickly that to have a competitive product we will need to have our own custom front end and that it will be based on SQL Server 2008 R2 (as that is what most of our clients have already).
We have our own in-house SSRS expertise so we already have a fair idea on HOW we can do it.
What I would like to ask is this:
1) Has anyone done this before, as a professional product that can be released as an out-of-the-box solution to multiple clients? (i.e. not intranet)
2) If so, how long did it take you to develop?
3) Is there a best practice for launching/starting reports when not using the standard SSRS interface?
4) Has anyone done anything around building and displaying parameter controls on the fly based on the report that is selected?
5) From my research it seems that everyone that needs to do this is doing it themselves from scratch. Does anyone know of any third-party products/libraries/APIs that can be purchased (preferably with source code) that already do this that can be customised?
Thanks,
Paul

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003853 More actions · Answer 1

paul.murray (3/17/2013)
Hi All,
I am from a small software company that sells products exclusively for the mining industry. We have decided as a business that we need to have a new SSRS based reporting product (to supplement our existing Excel based one).
We have discovered fairly quickly that to have a competitive product we will need to have our own custom front end and that it will be based on SQL Server 2008 R2 (as that is what most of our clients have already).
We have our own in-house SSRS expertise so we already have a fair idea on HOW we can do it.
What I would like to ask is this:
1) Has anyone done this before, as a professional product that can be released as an out-of-the-box solution to multiple clients? (i.e. not intranet)
2) If so, how long did it take you to develop?
3) Is there a best practice for launching/starting reports when not using the standard SSRS interface?
4) Has anyone done anything around building and displaying parameter controls on the fly based on the report that is selected?
5) From my research it seems that everyone that needs to do this is doing it themselves from scratch. Does anyone know of any third-party products/libraries/APIs that can be purchased (preferably with source code) that already do this that can be customised?
Thanks,
Paul

I find that SSRS is disappointingly slow in rendering just about anything. With that in mind, what type of output are you looking for? Just tablular listings or just charts/graphs, or both on the same page?

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

paul.murray SSC Veteran Points: 289 More actions · Answer 2

Hi yeah we know it can be slow but while there are other products we could base it on there are various reasons why we chose SSRS - and we don't really have any other options at the moment.

The types of reports could be anything - charts, tables, dashboards etc

P Jones SSChampion Points: 12352 More actions · Answer 3

We've rolled out our own VB.Net web app over the in-house intranet using a tree view control, the report server database, role-based security and launching reports in their own window from links. It's not difficult but we don't do anything commercial.