Chapter 1. Introduction

The term Business Intelligence represents the capacity of a corporation to look at all business data as a whole in order to distinguish information which plays a key role in the strategic planning process and in decision making of the corporation. To achieve this all available data require consolidated preparation, for instance, in a Data Warehouse.

ReportServer serves as an interface to access these data, and the user can easily and efficiently make use of them. ReportServer offers tools to support you in your daily work establishing ready-to-print reports, or performing ad-hoc analyses.

Target Audience

In this manual we discuss ReportServer from the point of administrators that wish to extend ReportServers using scripts. This guide will also help report designers that use ReportServer script reports to create interactive reports or reports based on metadata kept by ReportServer.

Separate manuals and instructions illustrate the various aspects of ReportServer.

• ReportServer Configuration Guide: Describes the installation of ReportServer as well as the basic configuration options.
• ReportServer User Guide: The user guide describes ReportServer from the point of view of the ultimate user. It includes an in-depth coverage of dynamic lists (ReportServer's adhoc reporting solution), execution of reports, scheduling of reports, and much more.
• ReportServer Administrator Guide: The administrator guide describes ReportServer from the point of view of administrators that are tasked with maintaining the daily operation of the reporting platform including the development of reports, managing users and permissions, monitoring the system state, and much more.
• ReportServer Scripting Guide: The ReportServer scripting guide covers the scripting capabilities of ReportServer which can be used for building complex reports as well as for extending the functionality of ReportServer or performing critical maintenance tasks. It extends the introduction to these topics given in the administrator guide.

Content

This guide is based upon the ReportServer administrator's manual. We furthermore require basic programming experience in the Groovy programming language. An introduction to groovy can be found at https://groovy-lang.org/

This manual comprises the following chapters:

Part 1

• Getting Started In this chapter we describe how to setup a work space to comfortably test and develop ReportServer scripts. Here we also cover the basic terminology.
• Basic Script Services Introduces the GLOBALS object which provides access to services and entities for scripts.
• Advanced Techniques Covers monitoring, multithreading, scheduling and other advanced techniques
• Script Reporting This chapter covers the script reporting engine and script datasources.
• Tapping into ReportServer Explains the ReportServer HookHandler concept that allows to extend and customize various aspects of ReportServer.
• Extending the Client In this chapter we will look into various possibilities to extend the client side of ReportServer.

Part 2 - Examples

• Adding additional Database Support In this chapter we explain how support for additional relational databases can be added to ReportServer.
• Authentication against an Active Directory In this chapter we look into the authentication mechanisms of ReportServer and discuss how to authenticate against an Active Directory (LDAP)
• Additional Report Exporters This chapter covers the basics of adding custom export formats to the various reporting engines available in ReportServer.

Please contact us in case you have questions or suggestions. We are looking forward to your requests. You can reach us via email (info@infofabrik.de) or our online forum which you can find at https://forum.reportserver.net/.