Where is the Reporting Services Web Service API???

When creating reports for CRM 1.2 it was my undestanding that we should use
their web service interface and not query the database directly. The good
thing was that the web service would do the table linking for you and you
didnt have to care what tables the fields in your report came from (trying to
figure out the CRM database schema is not only complicated but also was
discouraged by Microsoft).

Now I am trying to develop reports for CRM 3 and I see no web service API
equivalent. Has it been discountinued? Also I noticed that some tables that
were being used before no longer exist (like ActivityBase) making this even
more difficult as not only i have to figure out the table relationships but
also the schema itself has changed...

I downloaded their sample CRM 3 reports to see how they query the database
and YES, they are querying it directly creating multiple dataset for each
report.... is there anything like the old web service API that could make
the job of creating/upgrading reports easier????

Joe
Wed Mar 29 15:53:39 CST 2006

With CRM3.0 you do query directly against the DB for the reports. There are
a series of views that you should use. They are named Filtered<entity> ie.
FilteredAccount. These views de-normalize the underlying base tables to
make the report generation simpler.




"Javier G" <JavierG@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:3E8AE66C-84A9-4B8F-9D0B-B1FB1C66BC8D@microsoft.com...
> When creating reports for CRM 1.2 it was my undestanding that we should
> use
> their web service interface and not query the database directly. The good
> thing was that the web service would do the table linking for you and you
> didnt have to care what tables the fields in your report came from (trying
> to
> figure out the CRM database schema is not only complicated but also was
> discouraged by Microsoft).
>
> Now I am trying to develop reports for CRM 3 and I see no web service API
> equivalent. Has it been discountinued? Also I noticed that some tables
> that
> were being used before no longer exist (like ActivityBase) making this
> even
> more difficult as not only i have to figure out the table relationships
> but
> also the schema itself has changed...
>
> I downloaded their sample CRM 3 reports to see how they query the database
> and YES, they are querying it directly creating multiple dataset for each
> report.... is there anything like the old web service API that could make
> the job of creating/upgrading reports easier????
>
>