Is this a sound design for Reporting Services

Hi,
We are looking at deploying Report Services within our organisation
however, we have to support multiple clients, operating systems and
authentication methods, so we are unable to use the in-built Windows
Security or Reporting Services Portal.
To resolve this issue I have designed a WebService that acts as a
facade / proxy to the Reporting Services Web Service and uses a
specifically created Windows Account to authenticate against the Report
Server.
Then the various consumers of our reports (home grown sites plus third
party portals) request the reports from our Web Service which supports
the various authentication methods required (LDAP / Single Sign-on etc)
and manages the various Roles / Permissions for the reports.
The Report Server is then securely tied down to the single Windows
Account that is used by our web service.
Does the above sound like a good solution or has anyone else used a
similar approach?
Thanks
RussPersonally, I am an advocate against building any additional facades on top
of RS. The moment you introduce another "wrapper", you are pretty much
kissing good-bye perhaps 30% of the RS feature set. For example, you can't
use the RS 2005 report viewers, interactive features, etc., plus in many
cases you will find yourself just reinventing the wheel (e.g. to handle
parameters, printing, etc.) Instead, in your case, I would gravitate toward
replacing the default Windows-based authentication with custom
authentication. If your reporting clients can invoke programatically your
web service, they should be able to capture the authentication cookie and
pass it back.
--
HTH,
---
Teo Lachev, MVP, MCSD, MCT
"Microsoft Reporting Services in Action"
"Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005"
Home page and blog: http://www.prologika.com/
---
"russ" <russ.1@.excite.com> wrote in message
news:1132222181.477746.69640@.g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
> We are looking at deploying Report Services within our organisation
> however, we have to support multiple clients, operating systems and
> authentication methods, so we are unable to use the in-built Windows
> Security or Reporting Services Portal.
> To resolve this issue I have designed a WebService that acts as a
> facade / proxy to the Reporting Services Web Service and uses a
> specifically created Windows Account to authenticate against the Report
> Server.
> Then the various consumers of our reports (home grown sites plus third
> party portals) request the reports from our Web Service which supports
> the various authentication methods required (LDAP / Single Sign-on etc)
> and manages the various Roles / Permissions for the reports.
> The Report Server is then securely tied down to the single Windows
> Account that is used by our web service.
> Does the above sound like a good solution or has anyone else used a
> similar approach?
> Thanks
> Russ
>|||Hi Teo,
Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that we are using 2000
and not 2005 and therefore are unable to use the RS feature set due to
the poor non-IE support.
Cheers
Russ|||Nonetheless, IMO, one should view the RS web service as the ultimate facade
and avoid building additional facades on top of it unless it is absolutely
necessary. There are functionality, security, deployment, and maintenance
tradeoffs once you go for the "facade-on-top-of-facade" approach.
BTW, you can still use URL addressability with non-web clients to get the
full RS 2000 feature set. For example, a COM or .NET application can use the
Web Browser control. That said, given the fact that URL addressability is
deprecated in RS 2005 in favor of SOAP, I would strongly consider moving
forward with RS 2005 and the Report Viewer control if possible.
--
HTH,
---
Teo Lachev, MVP, MCSD, MCT
"Microsoft Reporting Services in Action"
"Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005"
Home page and blog: http://www.prologika.com/
---
"russ" <russ.1@.excite.com> wrote in message
news:1132238241.374215.84200@.g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi Teo,
> Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that we are using 2000
> and not 2005 and therefore are unable to use the RS feature set due to
> the poor non-IE support.
> Cheers
> Russ
>|||many thanks for the advice :)
I think a push for 2005 is in ordersql