SQL 2005 Reporting Services custom report item (CRI) - what are the limits?

Question

Reading MSDN (and other sources) about custom report items (CRI) for reporting services 2005. It looks like I'm limited to generating a bitmap. Not even with some mapping overlay for detecting mouse clicks on it. Is there away to go around this? There are two things I would like to do:

• Embed HTML directly into the report, to format dynamic text.
• Embed flash (swf) control in the report. This could be done with HTML if the previous point is possible. But maybe there is another way

Any suggestions? What am I missing?

Answer 1

You didn't missing anything.

For me, like you mentioned, the main disadvantage is, that with a CRI you can only render images. You don't get any scalable text or something similar. If you want include swf, you need to render it as static image.

Answer 2

You can render the report as HTML and include the report using a floating frame in a page with the swf file. You can use functions to format dynamic text. SSRS 2008 solves some of these problems with the "richly" formated textbox (not RTF). it may worth a look, if it's an option.

Answer 3

You might want to take a look at Data Dynamics Reports which has all of the RS features and has better support for custom report items with a complete API not just bitmaps.