asp.net - ASP.NET Report server conditional (if available) use

Question

We develop an ASP.NET application that displays tabular data to users. The data comes from stored procedure in a database. We developed a custom control to display this data in HTML table. However lately, we discovered the beauty of using Report Server and migrated all of our reports there.

The situation is that we offer this application to both users with Report Server and without Report Server installed. We would like to offer old-reports style to users without RS and embed RS controls to those who have RS installed --- but both solutions integrated into one application.

How should we handle assembly references? Is namespace Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms always available? If not can we use .NET library file as part of our application and distribute it with it? Are there any problems that might arise?

The fact that RS is or is not installed (and its address) would be handled via configuration file.

Could you please help me? Thanks all in advance.

Answer 1

You can deploy/distribute the appropriate ReportViewer DLL's with your own application/code, for websites I don't think you specifically need to install the ReportViewer on the server. The web.config will need to be adjusted, there's this MSDN article which describes all the different aspects.

As far as I can tell from your question, you'll allow users of your code to switch between a control that does or doesn't use a ReportViewer, based on an AppSetting (or something akin). This should be perfectly possible with the above setup.