Leveraging the ReportViewer control in WPF

Microsoft's ReportViewer control is an ideal candidate for embedding reports in a WinForms application. It takes care of the generation, rendering, printing, and saving of reports, even if you don't host these in SQL Server Reporting Services. The ReportViewer only exists for WinForms and ASP.NET: there is no ReportViewer control for WPF. If you migrate a WinForms application to WPF, you can however leverage your existing reports and skills.

Any Win32 Control can be embeded in a WPF form by hosting it in a WindowsFormsHost element. All you need to do is add a reference in your project to Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms, and wrap the ReportViewer control in a WindowsFormsHost element, like this:

<Window x:Class="ReportViewerSample.Window1"

        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

        xmlns:rep="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms;assembly=Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms"

        Title="ReportViewer Sample" Height="800" Width="500">

    <DockPanel>

        <WindowsFormsHost x:Name="windowsFormsHost1">

            <rep:ReportViewer x:Name="ReportViewer1"></rep:ReportViewer>

        </WindowsFormsHost>

    </DockPanel>

</Window>

Unfortunately Visual Studio's designers and code generators won't help you in hooking up the datasets, the resources, and the report itself to the ReportViewer, so you have to do it all programmatically. Here's how your code could look like:

// Create and Fill DataSet(s)

AdventureWorksDataSet ads = new AdventureWorksDataSet();

SalesOrderDetailTableAdapter adapter = new SalesOrderDetailTableAdapter();

adapter.Fill(ads.SalesOrderDetail);

// Attach DataSource(s) to ReportViewer

ReportDataSource rds = new ReportDataSource();

rds.Name = "AdventureWorksDataSet_SalesOrderDetail";

rds.Value = ads.SalesOrderDetail; // Could also come from a WCF Service

ReportViewer1.LocalReport.DataSources.Add(rds);

// Attach Report to ReportViewer

ReportViewer1.LocalReport.ReportEmbeddedResource = "ReportViewerSample.SalesReport.rdlc";

// Alternative: ReportViewer1.LocalReport.ReportPath = @"../../SalesReport.rdlc";

// Populate Parameters

List<ReportParameter> parms = new List<ReportParameter>();

parms.Add(new ReportParameter("Report_Parameter_0", "25"));

ReportViewer1.LocalReport.SetParameters(parms);

// Display

ReportViewer1.RefreshReport();