ssrs

A while back I needed a way to extract values from a LocalReport object. I wrote a proof of concept application that rendered the object as Excel/Xml data, then parsed that data using OpenXml. This worked perfectly well within the very limited scope typical of a POC, but when I finally got the chance to put it to real world use there were a few predictable snags. Most were reasonably simple to resolve but one - and only one - of the reports I was rendering resulted in this lovely error:...

How oh how is one to get XML from a local (not server) SSRS report? As it turns out, via Excel. The LocalReport.Render() method only supports Excel, PDF, and Image formats, but since the Excel 2007+ file format is just compressed XML, it didn’t take too much finagling to get what I was really after. The only thing I needed was the Microsoft OpenXml SDK, easily acquired through Nuget. This code snippet shows how to get the rendered values from a LocalReport in memory:...