Programmatic Interfaces

The Reporting Services programmatic interfaces accept SOAP (via SSRS web service) and HTTP requests (via URL Access). For more information about SSRS web service, please see Chapter 25, "How to Use Reporting Services Web Service." For more information about SSRS URL Access, please see Chapter 24, "How to Use URL Access."

SSRS 2005 web service provides three endpoints:

• http://localhost/ReportServer/ReportService.asmx is provided for backward compatibility with SSRS 2000.

• http://<server>/ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx is the new management endpoint in SSRS 2005.

• http://<server>/ReportServer/ReportExecution2005.asmx is the new execution endpoint.

The name of an endpoint describes the purpose. For example, the execution endpoint is designed to provide report execution (processing) interfaces and, with that, an access to functions, such as Render . Function Render returns a rendered report as a stream with a specified format, such as HTML.

Programmatic interfaces facilitate retrieval of information from the SSRS catalog and information exchange between SSRS components .

When a report is requested , either interactively or by the Scheduling and Delivery Processor, programmatic interfaces initialize the Report Processor component and start processing a report.