Include external documents (Word- Excel- PDF) in the rendering of Reporting Services reports?

Aspose.Total Product Family
1

Hi

Is it possible to use the Aspose components to include external documents in the rendering of reporting services reports?

Say you allready have have a report in ReportingServices with a links to external documents, but you really would like the documents to be rendered within the report. Is this possible with the Aspose components?

2

Hi,

I am a developer of Aspose.Words for Reporting Services. Thank you for an interesting question. Actually I was thinking of implementing this feature in the past. I think it is not hard to add. One question I have is, how you think those links, or placeholders for the external documents, should look like?

Thanks.

3

Hi,

Importing existed PDF is not supported in Aspose.Pdf. I am afraid we can’t support this feature in short time.

4

Hi,

Thank you for considering Aspose. We agree with the suggestion of Aspose.Words team. Please tell us the details of your requirement and we will plan to implement your required feature in Aspose.Cells for Reporting Services.

Thank You & Best Regards.

5

I would think you could use the same type of placeholder as for images.

With the Image Properties you define the URL in the General tab, and you also have the sizing capabilities in the Size tab.

If you could render the documents interactively (ReportViewer/ReportManager), then the show/hide functionality in the Visibility tab would be a good feature. If the document was rendered interactively actually as an image, which I think is not a bad solution, then you could also use it as a thumbnail and jump to the document when specified in the Action tab.

More advanced features could be selecting pages, like you can do in Word for printing, e.g.:

Pages : 1,3, 5-10

Or defining a bookmark, e.g.: #Maintenance_checklist1

For Excel you could specify a specific item, e.g.:

Item: Table1

In my case I would like to use the functionality to combine our enterprise architecture documentation (with workflows, process documentation, etc.) together with our customers already set of word documents, for example routine descriptions for a specific activity in a workflow or publish a complete documentation for a specific role in the organization.

But if you put the placeholder in a table control and have references to multiple word documents with different styles on each row in the table. How would you deal with the different styles if you export to Word? I guess a Word export should not represent each external document as a image as you probably would do in the interactive mode.

6

Thank you for the details. I still have some points to make clear.

  1. So should the documents be rendered then inserted as images, or their contents should be inserted and merged with the "main" document?
  2. I'm not sure how to render the documents in design mode (ReportViewer/ReportManager). Implement a custom report item maybe? Do you have any ideas on that?