Using Telerik Report WCF Service (or how to display reports in RadBook)

If you are following the Telerik Reporting product closely you may already know that with the 2009 Q3 release we entered the Silverlight game. The industry's first native Silverlight Report Viewer allows you to display Telerik Reports in your Silverlight application while having all goodies that the Windows Forms and Web viewers offer. The new member of the report viewers' family sports report parameters, the new document map, true printing and export to all available formats, including PDF, Image (TIFF, PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF), Microsoft Excel (XLS), Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, CSV and the new XPS. And all this power wouldn't be available without the reporting engine we already have and use in the other two technologies (Windows Forms and ASP.NET).

The Telerik Reporting Service is a WCF service that enables remote access to the Telerik Reporting Engine. The Reporting Service acts as a communication interface between the client programs and the report server. Thanks to it the Silverlight viewer can utilize the full capabilities of the reporting engine making no compromise with the different platform. Besides the report generation/rendering the the Telerik Report WCF service provides additional operations dedicated to the needs of the Silverlight report viewer.

This blog post illustrates how to create a custom report viewer application that utilizes some of the key Report Service operations. It uses the new RadBook Silverlight control to host the report pages. If you are not familiar with the new control in Telerik RadControls for Silverlight, check the First Look at RadBook for Silverlight blog for more insight.

Below is a Live Demo to help you experience this first hand - just point your mouse to a page corner and turn the page!

Open demo in new window.

The complete source code is available here. Please note that the provided implementation is for demo purposes only.