>>>Oh my... I've gotten very far in building my first real Asp.Net WebForms app. It all works fine as a basic CRUD app. Now, it's time to start generating reports that my client wants. Uggh! It seems like a whole new boatload of crap I now have to learn.
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>>>It looks like one way to create a report in a .Net is using Sql Server Reporting Services and it appears that the report designer is integrated into Visual Studio. So, in Visual Studio I spent some time playing around with its Reporting project template by adding a new "Reporting" project to my solution. It immediately starts all this crap about creating a DataSource and then it wants to create DataSets. Since my app uses the "LinqToSql Business Object Wrapper" from the "Westwind Web Toolkit for Asp.Net" to do all the data access, I have no stinkin DataSource or DataSets in the app. So, just to play along, I let it create some of those horrible things and now I have this smelly .xsd file in my project with a few TableAdapters in it to match the tables from the SQL Server. Yuck! Anwyay, I finally got a report designer surface to show up in Visual Studio, and just to test it out, I dragged a field from a one of those DataSet/TableAdapter thingies onto the surface.
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>>>I kinda stopped right there. I'm really not wanting all this extra and redundant overhead in my project.
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>>>So, all you veterans, how does one best go about getting a few simple reports for his app? I need something the user can preview from the app, and send to his local printer. PDF would be great, but I'm not so sure just printing a HTML generated page would bo the right choice. I may also need it to be e-mailed to them, which I can handle sending the e-mail, as long as I am using a tool that generetes a file on the server that I cand send in the e-mail, then erase.
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>>>I plan on using DiscountASP.Net to host this app, so whatever I choose must be able to be hosted on their servers also.
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>>>Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.
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>>I use SQL Reporting Services and the ASP.NET ReportViewer for pretty much all my ASP reporting. They do require a dataset (add a dataset to your project, give it the SQL you need, then define your report, and there it is!).
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>>Is your data in SQL Server ot in VFP tables? If it is SQL Server, do things the SQL Server way - you don't need WestWind at all. The tools are built-in.
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>>UPDATE..
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>>If your data is VFP tables, move it to SQL Server and get it over with!
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>What do you know about this issue of .rdlc reports versus .rdl reports? I am confused about whether I can just create these local .rdlc reports and then upload them to the hosting site along with the rest of my app files and if they will then work when a user hits the site? I'm confused about this whole notion of Report Server and SSRS that I keep seeing.
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The ReportViewer control in Visual Studio creates RDLC files under the hood in your website. ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005+ will generate reports on your website w/o needing Reporting Services (SSRS) installed on the SQL Server. Almost everything I do is done using the ReportViewer control.

If you want users/administrators/etc to be able to create new report templates (RDL files) w/o using Visual Studio, then you need SSRS installed (this creates its' own website for reporting). This allows a fair amount of ad hoc reporting for the users, and has a pretty good rights model so users can't screw everything up w/o working at it.

If you want to build reports for your website, use the ReportViewer control and build them (RDLC files). You have full control over the report, and at the same time it has built-in capabilities for grouping, expand/collapse, export to PDF/Excel, etc. VERY nice!

RDL and RDLC are just the file extensions - you don't need to worry about them because VS or SSRS will create them for you.

>I saw this info in the Microsoft Help:
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>If you use both the ReportViewer controls and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, you can reuse the reports that you create in both reporting technologies.
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>Reports that you create in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (saved as .rdl files) can be converted to the client report definition (.rdlc) file format used by the ReportViewer controls. This is called an RDL-to-RDLC conversion.
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>Reports that you create for ReportViewer controls (saved as .rdlc files) can be converted to the report definition (.rdl) file format used in SQL Server Reporting Services. This is called an RDLC-to-RDL conversion.