SSRS & web services

Question

I have a tricky set of requirements and I am not 100% sure on the best solution.

I need a web based reporting solution (this is an absolute requirement)

• The data for the reports is provided via web services.
• These web services are hosted and provided by a 3rd party organization.
• The web services implementation requires a call to a “login” method that returns a token object and all subsequent calls to any other method requires this token to be passed in as a parameter.
• The reports will almost certainly require a call to more than one web service method (aside from the login method).
• Changes to the web services methods or the underlying SQL database is not possible.

After spending some time looking at how this would work (a SSRS report pulling data from a web service), it does not seem like this is a good fit, overcomplicated at best and possibly even unworkable at worst. My initial investigation has led me to believe that a SSRS Custom Data Extension would be required for this to work. Can anyone with relevant experience offer me some advice\guidance? Basically I need to know if a SSRS solution is possible and\or is there a better way to achieve this, possibly using other technologies.

Answer 1

Use .net to call the web services, deal with security etc

This forms the input into a ReportViewer control (in local mode) for presentation

This avoids dealing with custom SSRS extensions and leverages the SSRS rendering.