Quick Query....

[Longhorn2005]

Hi everyone..

I am about to start work on one of the projects where I need to develop a
web service or may be custom control which could be placed on one central
location and generate reports on the basis of requests made from different
locations.

This program also needs to allow users to export data in various formats
which could be an excel sheet, power point file or PDF. Web service is
exactly what I am thinking at this stage, but I am not entirely sure as we
can implement it with a web service.

I need some direction too where to start from...

Thanks,

[Drew Marsh]

Longhorn2005 wrote:

I am about to start work on one of the projects where I need to
develop a web service or may be custom control which could be placed
on one central location and generate reports on the basis of requests
made from different locations.

This program also needs to allow users to export data in various
formats which could be an excel sheet, power point file or PDF. Web
service is exactly what I am thinking at this stage, but I am not
entirely sure as we can implement it with a web service.

I need some direction too where to start from...

If I remember correctly, this is exactly what SQL Server 200 Reporting Services[1] does. Even if it's not exactly the same, it's a perfectly viable solution.

The biggest "problem" you probably want to address up front is how you will transmit the binary files back to the client. As you may or may not know, there are a couple options for sending binary data via web services. If you're using WSE for the server side implementation, the easiest route to go is DIME[2][3] since it's baked right into the API.

HTH,
Drew

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/sql/reporting/default.asp
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en...en-dime-02.txt
[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/12/DIME/