Microsoft Reporting Services WebServices and Java

Question

Has anyone successfully implemented a Java based solution that uses Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services? Reporting Services comes with a set of Web Services that allow you to control the creation of a report, execution of a report, etc and I am just starting development on a POC of this integration. A couple of choices I have yet to make is whether I want to use Axis2 for the wsdl-to-java functionality or use WebLogic's clientgen (wsdl 2 java) solution. I guess I can also use JAX-WS and wsimport. Before I dive into this, I wanted to see if anyone was doing this successfully with one of the many options available.

In the past, I've had a few issues on how null/blank/empty's are handled between .NET and Java web-services and I just wanted to see if this had come up as an issue with SSRS and Java integration. Thanks

Answer 1

My experience with RS would lead me to suggest you go with just about anything else. I think the web services portion would work fine but I'd be concerned about how RS manages memory and how many reports you need to be running at once before making any decisions. I'm fighting with memory management problems today with RS and even on top of the line hardware it's hard to run large reports (large number of rows returned and a wide result set).

That being said if you think RS can handle your usage then it might be good. The development environment is sort of nice and it's easy to understand and lay out reports. The table layout paradigm it has is pretty good.

Answer 2

I just wanted to come back and answer my own question. I started with Axis2, Apache's implementation of SOAP. After generating the client using WSDL2Java, I was able to successfully invoke Microsoft Reporting Services WebService and generate reports, output in Excel, PDF, CSV and other formats. In my case, I also used Axis2 or HttpClient's NTML authentication mechanism to have my application automatically 'log-in' using credentials from Active Directory and generate and distribute reports to many users.

Answer 3

we've successfully implemented that: JBoss 5 -> IIS proxy -> MS Reporting Services 2008 (via webservice).

There are few pitfalls: MS RS 2008 does not support 'Anonymous' access anymore (2005 does), and does enforce using NTLM authentication. That is still a challenge in Java world, there is no good NTLM library available.

To overcome that, we've implemented trivial proxy (IIS7 + ashx) that does NTLM authentication on RS (user/password hardcoded) and allows Anonymous access for JBoss (by simply rewriting http response).

Works ok :)

Cheers P