Connect DataSource to an active data provider

[NiccoMlt]

Hello,

I'm currently converting an old reporting system to Telerik. In particular, the legacy system is composed by a user interface and two services: a data provider and a print service. My job is to replace the print service with Telerik Reporting, developing an adapter between the data provider service and a Telerik DataSource.

The main problem is that the data provider service does not expose a way to access data; instead, it actively calls the print service providing data for a specific section to print.

I identified Telerik's ObjectDataSource as the best data source to use, which should refer to the adapter as if it is a business logic object; this object should refer to a buffer which is used by the legacy data provider service to cache data to print. The problem is that memory is a constraint, so I've done some testing before starting to develop such a complex solution. As far as I can tell after those tests, when printing the same section consecutively, Telerik asks for all the data needed at that level before showing the preview, so I should buffer every data before Telerik possibly can show them in the preview, which is unacceptable for big reports.

Am I right or am I missing something?
And if I'm right, is there any other way to make Telerik Reporting construct its preview in the same section-by-section way used by the legacy data provider?

Thanks in advance and best regards

[Nasko]

Hi Niccolò,

I believe you are dealing with very large reports and would like to separate them in smaller parts that the server is capable to handle. You can pass parameter values that limit the requested data. Using this approach you can render the same report multiple times with different parameter values, hence different data. Repeat until all sections/data are printed.

More information on the topic is present in the Performance Considerations and Using Parameters with the ObjectDataSource Component help articles.

Regards,
Nasko
Progress Telerik

[NiccoMlt]

Hi Nasko,

thank you for your answer. I discussed the problem with my supervisor: the solution you are proposing is not viable because the Telerik reports are automatically generated converting existing ones written in another old proprietary technology, so there is no way to do it with our converter; fortunately, the client relaxed the performance constraint, so we will proceed with the "normal" approach.

 

Thanks again for your answer and best regards.