Until recently, printed reports have been a real weakness of web applications. Reports either had to be coded using ASP or HTML code, which was time consuming and non-uniform, or a third-party reporting system such as Crystal Reports had to be licensed.

For Microsoft shops, SQL Reporting Services now fills the void for web-based reporting. Reporting Services is packaged in with SQL Server, so there is no additional license to buy if a SQL Server back-end is already in use.

Reports are authored using a designer that is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio. Report meta-data must be stored in a SQL Server database, but report content can come from any ODBC or OLE data source.

End-user presentation is a real strength of SQL Reporting Services. The very simple example below, an employee list from the sample "pubs" database, serves to illustrate some of the presentation features.

Sample SQL Reporting Services Report

User selection of report parameters is built-in to the presentation engine. Selection lists can come from a database, be defined directly in the report definition, or be free-form data entry. Date parameters automatically have a calendar-control pick option.

Also built-in to the Reporting Services presentation engine are paging (next, previous, first, last, specified), zoom, and searching. For printing, reports are first exported to an external format such as Adobe Acrobat, TIFF, or Microsoft Excel.

Another popular built-in feature is the drill-down capability. Reports that are designed with sub-groupings can have detail information hidden, letting the user choose to expand which sub-groups they are interested in. In the example above, the Designer and Managing Editor job titles have been expanded, while all other job titles remain collapsed.

SQL Reporting Services supports either on-demand or cached report content, scheduled execution with e-mail delivery, and access either by the built-in "reports" URL or via links from an external web application. Reporting Services can be a powerful component of custom-developed intranet applications, and is well worthy of consideration.