The Telerik Reporting Service is a WCF service that enables the remote access to the Telerik Reporting Engine. The Reporting Service acts as a communication interface between the client programs and the report server.

The Telerik Reporting WCF Service is usually exposed to the clients through a .NET 3.5 application.

Telerik Reporting WCF Service exposes two contracts:

• The Telerik.Reporting.Service..::..IReportService - meant for basic report operations, which can be used by client viewer applications: render, page navigation, parameters etc.
• The Telerik.Reporting.Service..::..IResourceService - all its exposed operations should be accessed through HTTP GET request only

Caution
The default Telerik Reporting WCF Service implementation uses ASP.NET Session in order to store various resources such as report pages and images. When ran out of web context (e.g. self-hosted service), it uses internal session storage. To make your own implementation, create your own service class derived from ReportServiceBase and override its GetState and SetState methods.

The WCF Report Service's main purpose is to provide access for the Silverlight Report Viewer to the reporting engine. There are 3 methods of Telerik.Reporting.Service.IReportService that may be of interest to you:

• IList<ReportInfo>IReportService..::..ListAvailableReports - returns a list of all available for the report service hosting application Report types. That is all types implementing the The Telerik.Reporting..::..IReportDocument interface that are available for the application hosting the report service.
• IList<ExtensionInfo>IReportService..::..ListRenderingExtensions - returns all rendering extensions available for the report service.
• IReportService..::..Render(string format, string report, NameValueDictionary deviceInfo, NameValueDictionary parameters) - renders the specified report (assembly qualified type name) in the specified format (see ListRenderingExtensions operation above), with the given deviceInfo settings and parameter values.

The Telerik Reporting WCF Service is a standard WCF service and is compatible with all hosted models described in the Hosting Services.

For more information on deploying a Silverlight application that utilizes Telerik Reporting, refer to Deploying Silverlight Application article.

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