I started working on a seemingly simple-sounding request to a program that I maintain. A user wanted to be able to click on a link in a report and have the order open in our exe program (which is written by us in vb.net). For example, the report contains all orders recieved in the last 24-hours. The user would click on the order and get the customer history, order history, etc. from inside the exe. I know SSRS has hyperlink fields, etc. I'm trying to figure out a way to get data back into my program. The original thought is that I should just put that data into the report. There's too much there to put into the report. I tried a bunch of different things, but I got pretty far with tcp. I setup a listener on a port, then sent data in from SRSS and it worked really well. The problem was that I needed the IP of the machine that was running the report (not the server) so I knew where to send to data. I tried a couple of ways (getting IP from the system table in sql, using pre-defined code, etc.) but I kept getting the server IP once the report was deployed. Basically, has anyone ever found the need to interact between a SSRS report and an EXE? I've thougt about sockets, windows messages, etc., but I don't think SSRS has the code-behind to handle something that complicated. I can't believe that nobody has tried this before. If anyone has any thoughts, let me know. John Longtime VB6 (and 5 and 4) Programmer, New to .NET

John, You can create custom assemblies in C# (VB.NET) and access them on the report to achieve this functionality. We did create a custom assembly to parse a file and display the details as part of the report. Here are some examples http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/30555/Adding-Custom-Assemblies-in-SQL-Server-Reporting-S http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920769Regards, Adhi My TFS Blog Please remember to mark as answered, if this reply helps

Thanks Adhi, I was playing around with those too, but I had some security issues. Those links look pretty good. I'll give them a shot and post the results. Longtime VB6 (and 5 and 4) Programmer, New to .NET

I did some testing, but I'm not sure custom assemblies are the complete answer. You still need a way to get data into another exe, so you have to use tcp, sockets, or something. Right? Also, while that doesn't solve the IP problem in particular, it does give me another avenue to add flexibility to reportsLongtime VB6 (and 5 and 4) Programmer, New to .NET