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Custom Report Item Implementation Requirements

This topic will discuss the prerequisites for developing and deploying custom report items.

Development and Deployment Requirements

Developing a custom report item for Reporting Services requires the following:

  • Administrative access to a server running Microsoft SQL Server with Reporting Services and Business Intelligence Development Studio.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or above with the Microsoft .NET Framework software development kit (SDK) installed.

  • Access to the .NET Framework SDK documentation.

  • Familiarity with component authoring and the component model namespaces in Visual Studio. For more information, see "Component Authoring" and "Component Model Namespaces in Visual Studio" on msdn.microsoft.com.

Language and Namespace Requirements

SQL Server custom report items fully support the .NET Framework. You can develop custom report items using your choice of .NET-compliant languages.

Visual Studio offers the developer many tools and features to simplify and accelerate the iterative cycles of coding, debugging, and testing and to make deployment easier. The .NET Framework SDK includes Visual Basic and C# compilers and related tools.

  • Custom report items use the Microsoft.ReportDesigner and Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces namespaces. These are stored in the Microsoft.ReportingServices.Designer.DLL and Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces.DLL assemblies, which are installed as part of Reporting Services.

  • Custom report item design-time components need to implement interfaces from the System.ComponentModel namespace in the .NET Framework. The System.ComponentModel is documented in the .NET Framework SDK documentation.

Important

By default, the .NET Framework is installed with SQL Server, but the .NET Framework SDK is not. Unless the SDK is installed on the computer and the SDK documentation is included in the Books Online collection, links to SDK content in this section will not work. After you have installed the .NET Framework SDK, you can add the SDK documentation to the Books Online collection and table of contents by following the instructions in Adding and Removing Help Collections.