Chapter 9: A Leading Exporter: Exporting Reports to Other Rendering Formats

Overview

Up to this point, we have been viewing reports in the preview format. The preview format works great during report development for checking out your report layout and interactivity. However, when you want to present your report to users who do not have Visual Studio, you need something other than the preview format to do the job.

In place of the preview format, Reporting Services allows you to export your report to other rendering formats so it can be presented to a user. These presentation rendering formats retain the layout, fonts, colors, and graphics of the report. The presentation rendering formats are as follows:

• TIFF Image

• Adobe PDF

• MHTML (web archive)

• Excel

• Print

• HTML

Reporting Services also lets you export your report to two additional formats, which are used primarily for rendering report data into a form that can be used by other computer programs. These data exchange rendering formats contain the data portion of the report along with a minimal amount of formatting. Here are the data exchange rendering formats:

• Comma-Separated Values (CSV)

• XML

Most of these rendering formats can be generated from the Preview tab in Visual Studio using the Export toolbar button. This allows you to render a report to a file or to a printer and manually distribute it to your users. It also allows you to verify what the report will look like when your users choose to receive your report rendered in one of these formats.

In this chapter, we will look at each of these rendering formats, which report features they support, and how they can best be used. To demonstrate each rendering format, we will use a report project that contains a set of reports with many of the layout and interactivity characteristics discussed in the previous chapters. If you wish to “play along at home,” you can download the Chapter09 report project from the website for this book and try exporting the report to each rendering format yourself.