Do you know when to use Reporting Services?

Like any solution, Reporting Services has its pros and cons. From our experience, we have discovered these things about Reporting Services:

❌ Cons:

• Parameters - you are forced to use built-in controls
• Query string - when you change the parameters and refresh a report, the values do not appear directly in the query string, making it hard to copy/paste URLs
• Can't separate SQL into a strongly-typed dataset or middle-tier object like in ASP.NET
• There are potential difficulties with the deployment of RS reports and the exposing of them. However, once we have the infrastructure...
• Not able to work natively with modern .NET

✅ Pros:

• You can develop read only reports faster in Reporting Services than ASP.NET
• Maintenance with RS is easier than ASP.NET, as with most cases you don't have to write any code
• Flexibility with groupings and totals is easier. In ASP.NET you would need to iterate through the DataSet, keeping variables with the totals
• Parameters are built-in. In ASP.NET there is code
• Drilldown interactivity. In ASP.NET you need to code up a treeview
• Users can have reports automatically emailed to them on a schedule
• Users can export natively to PDF and XLS, plus a variety of other popular formats

Nowadays, better technologies are used to handle reports. Examples include:

• Power BI - cloud-based solution that provides visually appealing reports and dashboards
• HTML based reports - HTML frameworks have evolved significantly, making it quick and easy to make great reports

For a more detailed comparison between reporting solutions, take a look at our Guidelines for Report Solutions - Web Clients.

Figure: Reporting Services has built-in support for PDF/XLS export and can be embedded in your ASP.NET pages