SQL Server Reporting Services is an incredibly full featured reporting tool. An often asked question though is “How can I use Reporting Services without setting up a full SQL Server just to run Reporting Services?”

Fortunately the folks at Microsoft thought of this, and created a version of Reporting Services that runs in Local, or what Microsoft calls Client mode. There are several ways to use client mode, you can bind the report right to the database if you wish, or to an object. However if you have an application that’s been around for a bit, or maybe you’ve been around for a bit, chances are you have a lot of ADO.NET DataSets you’d love to use for data in a report. Today we’ll look at how to bind those data sets to a SQL Server Reporting Services report.

Let’s say you have created an application to work with the AdventureWorks2008 database. You user has now asked you for one last feature. They wish to display a list of Vendors in a report. They want to preview the report, print it, and be able to export it to a PDF format.

Based on your experience you know that SQL Server Reporting Services would be a good choice. However your client does not have an instance of SQL Server Reporting Services running in their corporation. Thus the path is clear, use SQL Server Reporting Services in Client mode.

Preliminary Work

Prior to beginning our work, we’ll need to do two basic setup steps. First, if you don’t have it already, you will need to download the Adventure Works 2008 database from CodePlex. Install it following their instructions. Here is the current location for AdventureWorks2008:

http://www.codeplex.com/MSFTDBProdSamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=18407

Now open up Visual Studio 2008 and create a new C# WinForms application. Note that while the ReportViewer control we’ll be using works fine in WinForms, ASP.Net, or WPF, for simplicity we’ll use a WinForms application. Give your project a meaningful name (I used ReportingServicesLocal).

Create the DataSource

Normally Reporting Services knows what tables and columns are available because you have setup a connection to a database. In this scenario however, we are going to bind the report to an in memory ADO.NET DataTable.

At design time then Reporting Services does not know about the DataSet, and so we must create a surrogate for Reporting Services. Thus we’ll create a special type of XML schema definition to stand in for our not yet created DataSet.

To accomplish this, first we need to create the Data Source schema by following these steps:

1. Right click on the project in the Solution Explorer window.

2. Select Add, New Item.

3. Click on the Data leaf of the Visual C# Items branch in the Add New Item window.

4. Pick the DataSet item. Give it a meaningful name, such as VendorList.xsd.

Now we need to add a table to the DataSet.

1. In your toolbox, under DataSet find the Data Table tool and drag it onto the design surface.

2. Click the DataTable1 and rename it to Vendors.

The last step in the process is to add our columns to the Vendors DataTable we just created.

1. Right click on the name of your DataTable and pick Add, Column from the pop up menu.

2. For the first column type in VendorName. Note that if we needed to, we could now go to the properties window and change the DataType to something other than the default of System.String. For this lab, everything we’ll use is a string so this won’t be needed.

3. Repeat step 2, adding these column names: AddressLine1, AddressLine2, City, StateProvinceName, PostalCode

When done it should look like:

Create the Report.

Now that we have a schema, we’re ready to create the report and add the components to it. To create the report, follow these basic steps.

1. Right click on the project and select Add, New Item.

2. In the pop up window, go to the Reporting leaf under the Visual C# branch.

3. Pick “Report”, and give the report a meaningful name such as VendorList.rdlc.

Now that the report is created, we need to add the components and data columns to it.

1. With the blank report, drag a Table control onto the report body.

2. Open the Data Sources window by selecting Data, Show Data Sources from the Visual Studio menu.

3. You should see the VendorList DataSet, under it the Vendors DataTable, and under it the columns.

4. Drag the VendorName to the first column of the table. Next, drag the City to the second column, and the StateProvinceName to the third.

5. Right click on the column header for StateProvinceName and pick “Insert Column to the Right”.

6. Drag the PostalCode to this newly inserted column. Your report should now look something like:

Adding the Report Viewer to the Windows Form

Now that the setup tasks are complete, it’s time to get to the user interface ready. First we’ll do some basic setup of the form.

1. When you created the basic project Visual Studio created a default Windows Form, Form1.cs. Start by changing the Text property to read “Report Viewer”.

2. While we’re at it, let’s change the (Name) property to frmReportViewer.

Now add the Report Viewer control to the form.

1. In the toolbox, navigate to the Reporting area, and drag a MicrosoftReportViewer control onto the form. Resize so it takes up the lower 90% or so of the form.

2. Change the name to rvwMain (or something meaningful).

Next add a button to the form. We’ll use it to trigger the report.

1. From the Common Controls area of the toolbox, drag a button control onto the form.

2. Change the (Name) property to btnDataSet.

3. Change the Text property to DataSet.

4. Double Click on the button to open up it’s code behind.

We’ll be supplying the data to the ADO.Net dataset using SQL Server, so we need to go to the top of the form and add a reference to the System.Data.SqlClient.

using System.Data.SqlClient;

Now let’s go into the btnDataSet_Click event, and add some code to fill our dataset. This code snippet will bind to our local SQL Server, create a command to do a simple select statement to a view, and fill the dataset.

  /* Fill the Dataset ------------------------------------*/
  string qry = "select v.Name as VendorName "
                  + ", v.AddressLine1 "
                  + ", v.AddressLine2 "
                  + ", v.City "
                  + ", v.StateProvinceName "
                  + ", v.PostalCode "
               + "from Purchasing.vVendorWithAddresses v "
              + "order by v.Name ";

  string connectionstring = @"Server=(local);"
    + "Database=AdventureWorks2008;Trusted_Connection=True;";

  SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(connectionstring);
  SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(qry, connection);

  SqlDataAdapter daVendor = new SqlDataAdapter();
  daVendor.SelectCommand = cmd;
  DataSet dsVendors = new DataSet();
  daVendor.Fill(dsVendors);

Note that in the first line of our select statement, we had to use v.Name as VendorName. The column names we return from our dataset must match the column names we entered in the Data Source back in Exercise 2 Step 3. Fortunately SQL easy to use “AS” syntax makes this simple.

Also, even though in this example we use SQL Server, the connection could be to any Data Source such as MySQL or Oracle. The important thing is we wind up with a DataSet to bind to.

In the same btnDataSet_Click method we now need to tell the report viewer control which report to run, then where to get it’s data. To tell the ReportViewer control to use a local report (as opposed to a report residing on a Reporting Services Server) we need to set the ReportEmbeddedResource property.

  rvwMain.LocalReport.ReportEmbeddedResource = "ReportingServicesLocal.VendorList.rdlc";

Note the format of the string we pass in. It has the name of the project, then a dot, then the name of the report complete with it’s rdlc extension. You should also know this is case sensitive.

Now we need to tell the report where our data really is. To do this, we’ll tell it to bind the Vendor data table from the VendorList data source to the dataset we generated in the step above.

  rvwMain.LocalReport.DataSources.Add(
    new Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportDataSource(
    "VendorList_Vendors", dsVendors.Tables[0]));

We need to create a new ReportDataSource to pass into the Add method of the reports DataSources. In the constructor for the ReportDataSource we pass in two parameters. The first is the name of the DataTable we are binding to.

Note that it’s syntax is a bit odd, you have to address it with first the DataSet name, then use an underscore to append the name of the specific DataTable.

The second parameter is the specific table from the dataset to bind to. Since we only had 1 we can use the simple .Tables[0] syntax shown here. We could have also given it a specific name.

One final note, in this simple example we are only binding one data source. However it’s possible for reports to have multiple data tables contained in them. To bind each one, we would simply have created a data table for each in the XSD, then added the code to the step above to read each one in, then bound them in this step by repeating this line of code for each one.

Finally we’re ready to display the report. Simply add this line to trigger the generation of the report.:

      rvwMain.RefreshReport();

Test your application.

Everything is now setup, you should be ready to run.

1. Launch the app from Visual Studio.

2. Once open, click on the DataSet button.

3. Your screen should look something like:

And there you go, you too can now easily create nice looking reports from your existing ADO.NET datasets.