Summary

In this chapter, you’ve learned about reporting. Although built-in reporting is not available in LightSwitch, you have lots of options for building your own reports. The main topics covered in this chapter were as follows:

• Creating web-based reports using ASP.NET or SQL Reporting Services
• Linking and displaying these reports in LightSwitch
• Creating documents and mail merges by using Microsoft Word
• Creating PDF documents on the client

You can use ASP.NET to build web pages that display data or charts. You can add parameters to your pages, if you want to filter the data shown to the user.

If you need to produce richer output, you can use SQL Server Reporting Services. Reports are created in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and saved in a format called Reporting Definition Language (RDL). The types of reports that you can create include matrix and tablix. The matrix option produces cross-tab and pivot-table reports. You can also create drill-through reports that allow users to click a link and to view additional details. Code can be added into reports to assist with operations such as styles and formatting. Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and SQL Server Reporting Services with Advanced Services are no-cost options but are more limited in functionality.