LightSpeed 4.0 RIA & SSRS

Just wondering, since LightSPeed 4 will have native support for exposing entities via RIA services if this would be the same as exposing it via web service?

I am currently looking for a way to make SQL Server Reporting Services to be able to interface with my domain model and wondering if RIA services could be used as a data source. Currently we either write custom web services from scratch to expose our business model or have SSRS talk directly with the underlying databases.

Is there any other way you can recommend re-using my lightspeed model in SSRS?

This would be a great selling point for convincing my company to adopt LightSpeed. I've been evaluation LS for a while and need to convince management that this would be a good move.

Thanks.

The source format used by RIA Services and ADO.NET Data Services is OData, which is not quite the same as traditional SOAP Web services.  Looking at http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/559570/ssrs-should-be-able-to-use-odata-as-a-data-source it looks like SSRS is not currently able to consume OData feeds, but on the other hand http://prologika.com/CS/blogs/blog/archive/2010/04/25/reporting-from-odata-services.aspx seems to imply that you can use a dataset query with a XML Data Provider to make it work, at the cost of having to set up a data source for each OData feed.  If you google around for "SSRS OData" you can probably find more info.

Any information you find should work with LightSpeed 3's ADO.NET Data Services provider and LightSpeed 4's RIA Services stuff because they just produce OData feeds.  However we haven't tested them with SSRS as you can probably tell!  We would be very interested to hear your experiences if you try it out!

Im not too sure you can connect SSRS with RIA Services in general - but if you can then the LightSpeed domain service would work happily in the same way. From my last forway into SSRS I dont recall seeing anything other than the XML feed option which works fine for web services but I dont think it would have the understanding of RIA Services to pass through any query requests other than perhaps for "all instances of an entity type".

So given that just exposing a standard web service which returned a full set of each entity type shouldnt be too problematic. Is that what you are currently doing?

Jeremy

Thanks guys for your replies. When I first started evaluating LightSpeed another developer on our team was making a push for a different ORM tool (I forgot which one exactly), and one of the major selling points (at least in claims) was that the visual model designer resulted in a model that could be re-used in SSRS, the end product is compatible with SSRS's own business domain/model designer.

This would be a major benefit as it would allow the power users to design and execute their own reports, hence no longer relying (heavily) on I.T to develop reports (that end up never being used).

While I know this is not possible with .lsmodel output of LightSpeed, my intention is to have integration as tight and seamless as possible, so my guess for the next best thing is tapping into LightSpeed's web services capabilities. I am still reasearching & evaluationg how others are using the RIA protocal, the general trend seems to be like more and more of Microsoft's products are adopting this protocal. SSRS currently can serves it's reports via RIA, but cannot act as a consumer of a RIA service.

Now you know what our intentions/wishlist is like.. if you have any ideas/suggestions please do share. Thanks.

One option you could explore is to extend the LightSpeed code generation templates, or add your own T4 templates, to generate whatever it is that SSRS requires.  We would be happy to support you on this and would be interested to see the results.  For basic starters see:

http://www.mindscapehq.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/16/customising-lightspeed-entity-templates/

http://www.mindscapehq.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/12/using-t4-templates-with-lightspeed/