Report Types

Report supports the following types of reports: Page Report, Web Report, and Library Component. As a report developer, your first task with Designer is to decide what report type will best serve your reporting requirements. This topic compares the report types briefly to help you know about the characteristics of each report type.

Page Reports

Page reports provide paginated result sets. They run in Page Report Studio in the Report Server-powered runtime environment.

A page report contains one or more report tabs that are of the same or related purposes. You can design, maintain, run, and schedule the report tabs in a page report together or separately. This can maximize performance by sharing data sources in one report.

Page reports support complex reporting techniques such as pixel-perfect reporting. They also provide features that are unique to themselves such as subreports, bursting reports, and complex calculations that require the use of formulas which apply global variables.

You can edit page report templates in both Designer and Page Report Studio. See:

Creating Page Reports for examples of creating page reports in Designer.
Creating and Performing Data Analysis on Page Reports about creating and running page reports in Page Report Studio.

Web Reports

Compared with page reports, web reports provide easier and faster report creation and design, faster report execution, streamlined customization, and interactive presentation style using the latest Web technology.

Web reports are more efficient at runtime than page reports. They allow most user actions to be performed in a browser rather than going back to Server for every request. Web reports can therefore handle a much larger number of user requests than page reports on the same hardware. Moreover, when running a web report in a browser using Web Report Studio, you have a user interface to view each component with local page navigation and scroll bars that are not available in a page report. When exporting a web report as a PDF file or printing, you can still have page numbers and page breaks, as with a page report.

Web reports also support agile development techniques such as continuous integration by enabling you to update report templates in both Designer and Web Report Studio. See:

Creating Web Reports for an example of creating a web report in Designer.
Creating a Web Report Using the Quick Start Method and Creating a Web Report Using the Wizard for examples about creating and running web reports in Web Report Studio.

Library Components

Library components (or widgets) are charts, tables, crosstabs, and control components. They are created and edited in Designer for use in dashboards specifically at runtime.

Library components can communicate with each other via a messaging mechanism, which makes the runtime data synchronization possible.

Designer also supports saving data components in a web report as a library component. This is a good way to create library components by first building and testing them in a web report. Once the web report is working well, you can save the data components in it as library components for reuse.

See:

Creating Library Components about creating library components in Designer.
Self-Service Dashboard with Report for using library components in dashboards.

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