Figure 11.4 In the Sales By Territory report, the Zoom functionality is hidden from the toolbar. in Visual Basic .NET

Making Data Matrix ECC200 in Visual Basic .NET Figure 11.4 In the Sales By Territory report, the Zoom functionality is hidden from the toolbar.

Additional customizations for the ReportViewer control Let s say you don t want your end users to see the HTML toolbar. Maybe you have your own toolbar in your application, or maybe you just don t want your users to have the functionality provided in the HTML toolbar. Simply set the ShowToolbar property to false from the ReportViewer control property window (figure 11.2). The toolbar is shown right above the report title in figure 11.4. If you are trying to disable functionality from the end user, hiding the toolbar won t enforce this. Users can simply right-click on the rendered report to show the context menu, which exposes the toolbar functionality. To truly disable all toolbox functionality, you need to either set both ShowToolbar and ShowContextMenu to false or set the properties for the functionality that you want to disable. What if you want to disable some of the functionality, but not all of it In this hypothetical situation, you don t want your users to be able to export or print this particular report, but you do want them to have the ability to zoom in and out. Therefore, you need to expose the toolbar, but to disable the export or print functionality, you have to set ShowExportButton and ShowPrintButton to false. Not only will the control hide the buttons, but if users right-click on the control they won t see the option to export or print. Using remote mode allows you to add the reports that you created and deployed to your Report Server in part 1 of this book. Using this mode is the easiest and quickest way to add existing reports to your applications. After reading this section, you should be armed with the knowledge needed to integrate, configure, and customize existing reports into your .NET 2.0 applications.

Even though there are separate controls for Windows applications versus web applications, it is important to understand that the differences are minor. If we had demonstrated this in an ASP.NET web application, you would have seen that all of the steps are virtually the same.

The local mode of the ReportViewer controls provides rich reporting without the use of a Report Server by embedding the report definition inside the application. This is a great way to use Reporting Services when you can t access a Report Server. To use local mode, you first have to create a report using Visual Studio 2005 from within your Windows or web application project. This is different from remote mode, in which you used reports that were created using the Report Designer and deployed to a Report Server. This means that with local mode you cannot natively use reports that you have already created and deployed to your Report Server.

Report Server (remote mode) reports have an .rdl extension whereas local reports used by the ReportViewer controls use the .rdlc extension. Later in section 11.5.1 you learn how to convert your RDL files for use with local mode. In this section, you learn how to create the RDLC from your Windows or web applications by creating local reports from a variety of data sources. Let s start off by using the ReportViewer control to get information from a database. As before, for this walkthrough example you can reference the sample code in the 11 folder of the AWReporterWin project. 11.3.1 Creating a local report with a database as the data source As stated earlier, in local mode the report file is created as an RDLC file instead of an RDL file. A second difference is that the report is created from within your application projects instead of a separate Reporting Services project. For the most part, everything else will feel the same as it did with remote mode, but there are some minor differences. We showcase many of these differences in our examples. For this hypothetical situation, you ve been asked to make the AWC employee directory available to field sales agents who don t typically have access to the AWC network. Let s assume that there is a process built that replicates or syncs the data from the AWC database to a database on the sales agent s local machine.