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Use the WinForms ReportViewer control

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To view reports that are deployed to a report server or reports that exist on the local file system, use the WinForms ReportViewer control to render them in a Windows application.

Add the ReportViewer control to a Windows application

Create a new Windows application using either Microsoft C# or Microsoft Visual Basic.

Open an exiting Windows application project and add a new form.

Locate the ReportViewer control in the Toolbox . If the Toolbox isn't visible, you can access it from the View menu by selecting Toolbox .

Drag the ReportViewer control onto the design surface of the Windows Form.

A ReportViewer control named reportViewer1 is added to the form.

After the control is added to the form, the ReportViewer Tasks smart tag appears and prompts you to select a report.

If the report you wish to view is deployed to a report server, select the <Server Report> option from the Choose Report drop-down list. After the <Server Report> option is selected, two more properties appear: Report Server Url and Report Path . The Report Server Url is the address to the report server and the Report Path is the full path to the report to render.

If the report you wish to view a report in local mode, select either the Design a new report option to launch the report designer or select a report that is already part of the existing project.

Viewing reports in remote processing mode

The following example demonstrates how to render a report that is deployed to a report server using the WinForms ReportViewer control. This example uses the Sales Order Detail report that is included with the AdventureWorks2022 sample reports project.

View reports in local processing mode

The following example demonstrates how to render a report that is part of the Windows application and isn't deployed to a report server.

To add the Sales Order Detail report to a Windows application

Open the Windows project to which the report will be added.

From the Project menu, select Add Existing Item .

Browse to the location where you installed the AdventureWorks2022 Report Samples project.

The download the report samples, go to AdventureWorks Report Samples

Select the Sales Order Detail.rdl file and select the Add button.

The Sales Order Detail.rdl file should now be part of the project.

Right-click the Sales Order Detail.rdl file in Solution Explorer and select Rename . Rename the report to Sales Order Detail.rdlc and press ENTER.

If Solution Explorer isn't visible, you can open it from the View menu by selecting Solution Explorer .

Renaming the file extension from rdl to rdlc will allow you to edit the report using report designer for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

After the report is renamed, select the file and locate the Properties window. Change the Copy to Output Directory property to Copy if Newer .

If the Properties window isn't visible, you can open it from the View menu by selecting Properties Window .

The following code example creates a dataset for the sales order data and then renders the Sales Order Detail report in local mode.

Related content

Integrating Reporting Services by using the ReportViewer controls

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Using ReportViewer in WinForms C#

Today in this Article, I am trying to explain how to dynamically create a report by using report viewer in a windows form.

To view reports that exist on local file system, you can use the WinForms ReportViewer control to render them in a Windows application.

The following example demonstrates how to render a report using ReportViewer control.

To add the ReportViewer Control to a Windows application

• Create a new Windows application using Microsoft Visual C#.
• Locate the ReportViewer control in the Toolbox.
• Drag the ReportViewer control onto the design surface of the Windows Form.

A ReportViewer control named reportViewer1 is added to the form.

This example also uses the following class (Student) and its properties and methods to display the data in the report. Please create or include the following class and its content in your application.

  To add the Student details report to a Windows application

• From the project menu, select Add New Item.
• S elect Report and edit the name and click the Add button. The StudentReport.rdlc file should now be part of the project.

In Data Source Configuration wizard choose a Data Source Type as Object

In the next step, select the Student class and click on the Finish button. 

• Add a new dataset in StudentReport.rdlc page and name the dataset as StudentDS.
• Choose Student from the Available dataset options.
• Click on the OK button to finish the step.

Insert a Table in the rdlc page as shown in the figure below:

Drag and drop the dataset fields into the inserted table columns.  

Select chart type from a variety of options given in the Select Chart Type dialog. Here I am choosing a default chart type.

After adding a chart, do the following steps to display the student data in chart format::

• Drag the Sum field from the dataset and drop it into the data field of Chart.
• Drag the Name field from the dataset and drop it into the Category field of Chart.
• Edit the X-axis title to Name and Y-axis title to Marks in order to make both the axis meaningful. 

Now bind StudentReport.rdlc

The following code example will render the Student report in the report viewer .

 Now run or debug this application to see the output:

Thanks for reading this article. You can enter your valuable comments and suggestion to improve this article in the comment box.

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SQL Server Reporting Services ReportViewer Control for Windows Applications

By: Scott Murray   |   Comments (10)   |   Related: > Reporting Services Development

Can I run a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report from Windows applications? If yes, what are the pro's and con's of doing so?

SSRS functionality is certainly available in a Windows application; Visual Studio .Net is actually the key component needed to develop a fully functioning report application. The Visual Studio application actually uses the ReportViewer control for processing a report. The .Net ReportViewer control actually comes in two flavors; one of the controls is used for Windows Forms applications while the second control focuses on Web Forms. For this particular tip we will focus on the Windows Forms control. A few additional items need to be noted when dealing with the ReportViewer control. First, you can run the report in local processing mode or remote processing mode. Local processing mode renders the report all within the local machine / application and can be used when SSRS is not installed. However, with local processing, not all the SSRS functionality is available, and, as such, reports can only render a report in PDF, Excel, Word, or Image formats. To the contrary, remote processing provides the best of both worlds. You must have SSRS installed (not necessarily on the machine running the application) for remote processing mode. Furthermore, the SSRS server handles the report run and processing, and thus any functionality available in SSRS is available in remote processing mode of the control. The ReportViewer employs the power of the Report Server to achieve the display of a report.  For this particular tip, we are going to focus on using the remote processing mode for a windows form.

Windows Form ReportViewer

To get started with our example, we first need to setup our various tools. As we have used in many of my other tips, we will again use the AdventureWorks 2012 SQL Server database; the database is available on Codeplex at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/55330 . Once you download and install the SQL Server database, we will subsequently use the SSRS 2012 sample reports which can be downloaded at http://advworks2012sssrs.codeplex.com/releases/view/106799 . We will assume that you have installed and initialized the SSRS instance and it is up and running. For this example, we will use the Customers Near Stores report, which I have already deployed to the report server as shown below.  

Our first step is to open up Visual Studio. For this example, we will use Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Express although you could use many of the various Visual Studio flavors to complete this task. However, in order to use the ReportViewer control we normally need to add a reference to the control in the toolbox. To achieve this step, as shown below, right mouse click on any part of the toolbox and select Choose Items.

Next, you will need to scroll down the list of controls on the .Net Framework Components tab until you get to the ReportViewer components. You will notice that two controls exist; one is for WinForms and one for WebForms. You will also notice that there are multiple versions of the control. For use here, we only need the 10.0.0 version. However, depending on your Visual Studio version, you may have to select an alternate version.

Once we have the controls in place we are ready to design our form. So within VB Express, Open a New Project, and then add a new Windows Form, as shown below, by right mouse clicking on your project in the Solution Explorer and then Selecting Add > Windows Form.   

As illustrated in the next screen shot, once you have the Windows Form created, next open up the toolbox, scroll to the ReportViewer control, and then drag it onto your form.

We now need to set the ReportViewer Tasks settings. To get the Tasks setting box to show up, you will need to click on the very small arrow in the upper right corner of the control. Next, you need to Select <Server Report> under Choose Report; in the Report Server URL, enter the URL for your Report Server. For my example, this URL is http://localhost/reportserver_SQL2012; of course, your URL will be different. Finally, under Report Path, you will enter the full path to the report including folders, sub folders, and report name. Be sure to enter the leading slash "/".

As you can see in the above screen print, you can actually design a report directly from the Task settings, although I prefer to have a report already completed. The very bottom option on the Tasks settings, Dock in Parent Container, will actually have the ReportViewer control maximize over top and cover the entire space of the Windows Form. It probably would be a good idea to resize the ReportViewer control to an appropriate size; otherwise, the report consumer may have to do a lot of scrolling. At this point, we have a full working ReportViewer implementation. If we build and run the project, we will get the following report. One item I should note is that this report had default values for each of the report parameters. Thus upon running the form, the report execution takes place and the report runs.

We can adjust the form to pass a parameter value to the ReportViewer control. In order to set the parameter and then re-run the report, we can add a simple textbox and then a button to refresh the report as shown below. For this particular report, we are going to adjust the Distance in miles parameter. In order to pass the parameter value, we need to find the exact parameter name from the report. For this report, the parameter name is "Radius".

In order to fully utilize the textbox and button, we do need to complete some quick coding to pass the parameter to the report.  As shown in the below code box, first we need to make sure we add a reference to Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms. 

Next, in the Reportviewer1_Load Sub, we need to add the above noted code. An explanation of each line of code is as follows:

• Line 1 - Create the ReportParameter variable named Dist.
• Line 2 - Set the name of the Dist variable to "Radius". Note this name needs to be the actual name of the parameter in the report.
• Line 3 - Set the "default" number that shows in the text box to 200 (i.e. the Distance in Miles will default to 200 miles).
• Line 4 - Set the Dist variable value to 200 (value in the textbox).
• Line 5 - Sets the parameter value for the report to the Dist variable value.

Running the report with this first Sub would always set the Parameter for the Radius to 200. If we want to make the report interactive, we can add a second Sub attached to a button control which reads the textbox and refreshes the report when the button is clicked. This second sub does the following:

• Line 3 - Clears the default or previous value of the Dist variable. 
• Line 4 - Set the Dist variable value to the value in the textbox.
• Line 5 - Set the parameter value for the report to the Dist variable value.
• Line 6 - Refreshes the report.

Now, we have a working Windows application that calls the report and allows for setting the Distance parameter, as illustrated below. The second screen shot shows setting the parameter to 312.

SSRS reports can be initiated from a Windows Form using the ReportViewer controls available in Visual Studio. The form can process in remote mode where the processing is handed over to an existing SSRS server or in local mode. Local mode had limited functionality whereas remote processing provides full SSRS functionality. In order to use the ReportViewer control, it most often must be added to your Visual Studio toolbox; once in your toolbox, it can be added to a form where you then set the URL of the report server, report folder and file location. Additionally, the report's parameters can be initiated, set, and passed programmatically to the report itself.

• ReportViewer Local Processing Mode -  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms251704(v=vs.110).aspx

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Recompilation of Microsoft.ReportViewer for .NET Core 3.1+

lkosson/reportviewercore

Folders and files, repository files navigation, reportviewer core.

This project is a port of Microsoft Reporting Services (Report Viewer) to .NET Core 3.1+. It is feature-complete and ready for production use, but keep in mind it is not officially supported by Microsoft.

For version history and recent fixes, see changelog .

With WinForms inclusion in .NET Core 3.1 and .NET 5 as a replacement for .NET Framework, it became feasible to port existing business desktop applications to .NET Core SDK to benefit from new C# and JIT features. Microsoft team stated on multiple occasions ( dotnet/aspnetcore#1528 , dotnet/aspnetcore#12666 , dotnet/aspnetcore#22304 , dotnet/docs#9607 ) that there are no plans to have official Reporting Services / ReportViewer package for .NET Core, which is a showstopper for applications using this technology for printing and reporting. The goal of this project is to provide transitional solution for such applications, until existing reports are reimplemented using more modern technology.

You should be able to replace references to Report Viewer in your WinForms project with ones provided in this repo and use Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportViewer as usual. See project ReportViewerCore.Sample.WinForms for a simplified example using local report processing and ReportViewerCore.Sample.WinFormsServer for remote processing using Reporting Services server.

For ASP.NET Core applications, add reference to Microsoft.Reporting.NETCore , which is based on WinForms version with stripped UI, and load/render report programmatically. See project ReportViewerCore.Console for an example or use following code as a starting point:

For consuming Reporting Services (server-side) reports, use:

or see project ReportViewerCore.WinFormsServer for more complete example.

There is no interactive, web-based report viewer provided in this project, but there are HTML4.0 and HTML5 rendering formats available. HTML5 format has been modified to also work without JavaScript. See ReportViewerCore.Sample.AspNetCore project for a simple demo.

Designing new reports

Visual Studio 2019 (version 16.9 and similar) does not include Report Designer by default. There is an extension provided by Microsoft called " Microsoft RDLC Report Designer " you need to be able to open and modify your reports. For Visual Studio 2022, you need " Microsoft RDLC Report Designer 2022 " extension.

Even after installing the extension, new dataset wizard fails to show classes from your project and .NET Core projects don't have .datasource file support either. The workaround is to create and add .xsd file to your project with definitions of types you want to use in your reports. You can either create this file by hand or use the following snippet to produce one for all the classes you need:

After including ReportItemSchemas.xsd file in your project, Report Designer should see a new datasource called ReportItemSchemas which you can use to add a dataset to your report.

• RDLC file loading and compiling
• Local data sources
• Parameter passing
• All rendering formats, including PDF and XLS
• WinForms report preview
• Remote processing using Reporting Services
• Linux and MacOS support
• MSChart control

Supported rendering formats

All formats are supported on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. For formats marked with asterisk (*), see "Linux rendering workaround" section below.

• HTML4.0 / HTML5 / MHTML
• IMAGE (TIFF/EMF) (*)
• EXCEL (Microsoft Excel 97/2003) (*)
• EXCELOPENXML (Microsoft Excel Open XML)
• WORD (Microsoft Word 97/2003) (*)
• WORDOPENXML (Microsoft Word Open XML)

Linux rendering workaround

Some rendering formats (most notably PDF) uses Windows-provided native libraries for font measurements (Uniscribe), which are unavailable on other platforms. They are, however, provided in barely working condition, by Wine version 5.0 or higher. To export your reports to PDF, TIFF or XLS:

• Install Wine 5.0 or newer. For Debian Bullseye, apt install wine will do.
• Download Windows version of .NET runtime binaries from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet - e.g. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/thank-you/runtime-3.1.30-windows-x86-binaries .
• Extract/install those binaries to some local folder, e.g. ~/dotnet-3.1-windows .
• Start your application using 64-bit version of Wine and Windows version of .NET, e.g. wine64 ~/dotnet-3.1-windows/dotnet.exe YourApplication.dll .

If your application crashes with unsupported flags 00000020 somewhere inside bcrypt , make sure you have proper version of Wine installed. Version 4.1 provided in Debian Buster and earlier won't work.

What doesn't work

• Spatial SQL types. Those require Microsoft.SqlServer.Types package, which is available only in .NET Framework. Reports using SqlGeography won't load.
• Expression sandboxing and code security. Do not load and run reports from untrusted sources.
• Interactive web report preview. It is closely tied to WebForms and ASP.NET architecture and porting it to ASP.NET Core would involve rewriting significant portions of the codebase.
• WinForms control designer. To use ReportViewer in your WinForms project, add the control programmatically, as in ReportViewerCore.Sample.WinForms\ReportViewerForm.cs .
• Single .exe deployment. Roslyn needs to be able to reference .NET and ReportViewer assemblies at runtime. When compiled to a single file, those are unavailable and any non-trivial report won't compile.
• Map control. Not really tested, but included in project anyway.
• As of .NET 6, Microsoft deprecated System.Drawing on non-windows platforms and removed it completely in .NET 7. This breaks reports using images on those platforms. Using a workaround mentioned above in Linux rendering workaround might help in those cases.

If you get Version conflict detected for "Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Common" error when adding this NuGet package, try first adding Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.Workspaces 3.6.0 or Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.Common 3.6.0 (manually selecting version 3.6.0) package to your project. For .NET 5 use 3.8.0 version. For .NET 6 use 4.0.1.

Reporting bugs

Before reporting issue, please make sure that your problem occurs only when using this package, i.e. it doesn't happen on original Report Viewer. When filing an issue, include full exception stack trace and - where possible - provide relevant RDLC or a sample project.

Source code for this project comes from decompiling Report Viewer for WinForms, version 15.0.1404.0 using ILSpy. Original Reporting Services use external Visual Basic and System.CodeDom compilation, both of which are not available in .NET Core. Those have been replaced with Roslyn Visual Basic compiler. References to .NET Framework assemblies have been updated to NuGet packages where possible. References to unavailable assemblies, such as Microsoft.SqlServer.Types , have been removed along with functionalities that depend on them. Sources are intentionally left formatted as decompiled by ILSpy.

Project Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms is mostly one-to-one recompilation of original ReportViewer for WinForms. Project Microsoft.ReportViewer.NETCore is heavilly stripped down version suitable for web applications, web services and batch processing.

Binary package

A precompiled package is available as ReportViewerCore.NETCore and ReportViewerCore.WinForms at nuget.org: ReportViewerCore.NETCore , ReportViewerCore.WinForms . Legal aspects of redistributing binary package are uncertain. Feel free to compile this project on your own. You'll need Visual Studio 2022 (Community version will do) and .NET 6 SDK. Reference either Microsoft.ReportViewer.NETCore.dll or Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms.dll in your solution.

Reporting Services is a free Microsoft product. While decompiling and modifying it for compatibility reasons is legal in my local jurisdiction, redistributing modified version most likely is not. Use at your own risk.

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ReportViewerCore. NETCore 15.1.19

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This project is not supported/developed by Microsoft

This project is aimed at porting Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (Report Viewer) to .NET Core 3.1, .NET 5 and .NET 6. Sources and examples are available at https://github.com/lkosson/reportviewercore/

Basic usage

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• Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.VisualBasic (>= 4.0.0)
• Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.VisualBasic (>= 4.4.0)
• Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.VisualBasic (>= 4.8.0-3.final)

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Officials warned of potential blackouts or interference with navigation and communication systems this weekend, as well as auroras as far south as Southern California or Texas.

By Katrina Miller and Judson Jones

Katrina Miller reports on space and astronomy and Judson Jones is a meteorologist.

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How strong is the current geomagnetic storm?

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Jonathan O’Callaghan contributed reporting from London.

An earlier version of this article misstated the radio frequencies used by cellphones and car radios. They are higher frequencies, not low.

How we handle corrections

Katrina Miller is a science reporting fellow for The Times. She recently earned her Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Chicago. More about Katrina Miller

Judson Jones is a meteorologist and reporter for The Times who forecasts and covers extreme weather. More about Judson Jones

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