Reporting Services Components - Windows Service

By: Ray Barley

Overview

The core of Reporting Services functionality is implemented as a Windows service.  While an in-depth understanding of this implementation is not required to use Reporting Services, it is nonetheless interesting at least in terms of a high-level description.

Explanation
The Reporting Services Windows service provides the following functionality as shown below in this diagram taken from Books on Line:

The following are the main points about the Windows service:

• The HTTP listener is a new feature; prior versions of Reporting Services required Internet Information Server (IIS).  With Reporting Services 2008 IIS is no longer required.
• Report Manager is an ASP.NET application that provides a browser-based interface for managing Reporting Services.  We will cover the Report Manager in a later section.
• The Web Service is also implemented as an ASP.NET application; it provides a programmatic interface to Reporting Services.  The Report Manager uses the web service.  You can use the web service to create your own custom implementation of any feature provided by the Report Manager.
• Background Processing provides the core services for Reporting Services.
• The Report Manager, Web Service, and Background Processing are each implemented as separate application domains.

The above implementation represents a substantial redesign from the 2005 version of Reporting Services and provides an enterprise-level reporting engine.