In order to understand the reporting environment, it is important to understand the interaction between the Report Viewer (users of reports), the application and the Report Server. The visual below shows how reporting works. For the remainder of this document, we will refer to the server that has Reporting Services and reports data as the Report Server.
- The application communicates with Report Server to retrieve reports catalog (what reports are available) and report templates (what the report is designed to do). This communication takes place over a Web service. This interaction takes place every time a user is creating new report instances.
- Report Viewer interacts with report Server to view report instances. This is done over HTTP/HTTPS.
- The Report Writer interacts with the Report Server to deploy reports.
- An administrator interacts with the Report Server to manage content and access.
- Report Server communicates with data via a custom OLE DB to get the data for the reports.