Printing Reports in Reporting Services

Reporting Services brings a lot of new and exciting features to the BI marketplace as a version one reporting tool. The programmatic interfaces as well as the extensibility architecture allow for a lot of features to be added by third-party developers. One question that I get from customers is if Reporting Services supports some kind of client- or server-side printing control that enables users to print reports with a single button click directly from the HTML viewer. This feature was not automatically built into the product in favor of focusing more on nailing down some of the other core features. Never fear, Reporting Services supports automatic exporting of reports to two, pixel perfect formats: PDF and Image. Reporting Services also has plans to support both server and client direct printing in future versions. Still, there may be an instance when you might want to build programmatic printing of reports into your business application. For one possible solution, please visit my articles area and check out Printing Reports Programmatically Using C# and SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.