I have written several dozen programs to date which take advantage of the Telerik AJAX suite and Telerik Reports. The combination has been very effective. As time has progressed we have updated our operating environment so that the consideration of going pure HTML5 is now an option.
What is needed to migrate existing application viewers and reports from their existing viewer and report layout? My reading of the documentation suggests that I might have unknowingly coded myself into a blind end. The HTML 5 reports seem to use a different file extension and I cannot find any means of conversion between the two layouts. Am I reading the "tea leaves" correctly?
As things now sit the existing apps are asp.net Ajax web forms type combined with Telerik controls and forms. New projects will be started with MVC/Kendo solutions however I would love to be able to use existing reports without having to rewrite everything and use a HTML5 viewer. With one program having 85+ unique reports you can see my problem.
Any insight and pointers would be appreciated. This is in no way intended as a slight against Telerik. Their products have been extremely useful and I look forward to getting to the "newer" technologies.
1 Answer, 1 is accepted
The HTML5 Viewer can display reports created by both existing Report Designers. Please check the How it works section in the overview of the HTML5 Viewer and How to: Set ReportSource for Report Viewers.
In general, it is a client-side HTML/JS/CSS based widget that can be added in any web application. For .NET projects there are MVC and WebForms wrappers to ease the configuration of the viewer, where wrappers render the same Javascript object in the page as the original widget will do.
The HTML5 Viewer can be separated from the Reporting REST service. The viewer sends short messages to get resources which are processed and rendered on the server. It is the Reporting REST service that handles the messages and that generates/delivers the requested resources.
The service comes with default report resolvers which attempt to resolve the viewer's reportSource.Report string as a TypeReportSource or a UriReportSource. You can use also a custom report resolver and add custom logic for getting a report by the received string description, and then create other type of report source object. For more details check REST Service Report Resolver.
Requested report are processed and rendered on the server. The service will place them in the configured cache storage and it will let you reuse the already rendered reports depending on the service's cache settings.
The recommended troubleshooting approach for the HTML5 Viewer is to use Fiddler or other proxy tool to check the requests, their responses and statuses. Information about requests and responses content can be seen in Fiddler - Inspectors - Request/Response - Raw tabs. This will let you check requests to the Reporting REST service and if the URLs are correct (if relative paths are resolved correctly).
Note that relative paths may need adjustment depending on how the application is hosted.
Let us know if you have any further concerns.
Regards,
Stef
Telerik