SSRS Calling a Subreport in Footer Through a URL

Question

I have several SSRS reports that all need to have the same footer, a payment stub.

Rather than have the footer recreated for each report, I want to have the footer as it's own report, and included as an independent subreport.

The problem, is you can't put a subreport in a footer in SSRS. So my idea is to make the footer an image called by a URL, and the URL is the subreport sitting on the SSRS server.

So if the subreport URL is this: http://localhost/ReportServer?/TAS/Reports/STUBTEST/REP90016&rc:PageHeight=3.7in&rc:PageWidth=8.5in&rs:format=IMAGE&rc:OutputFormat=JPEG&rs:Command=Render&rc:Parameters=Collapsed&P_ACC_ID=1&P_DATE=7-MAY-2020&P_PROP_ADDRESS=%27123%20Fake%20St%27&P_AMOUNT_DUE=1.78

And I put the above URL as the image URL, it does show the image I want in the footer in Visual Studio when I preview the report. However when I move the report to the SSRS server, and call the report as a PDF, the footer is blank.

Any ideas how I can achieve this?

Answer 1

My solution was this: Create a webservice that will call the URL for the subreport and covert it to base64 string.

In the main report, put some code in a function that creates a webrequest to the above ws and returns the string.

In the main report footer, create and image that calls the above function and convert it from a bass64 string to show the subreport as an image.