Not a lot of people know this, it seems (it came up again in a pre-sales phone call), but XtraReports can create reports for ASP.NET that will work on web hosts that require medium trust rather than having to force the hosting service to grant full trust.
I'll let that sink in for a while.
Yes, indeed, those reports you've created in the past that could only run in full trust (with all the attendant security issues) can all be converted to XtraReports and run on a medium trust server. I thought it was an important enough topic to blog about it here so that everyone knows.
However, there are a few limitations to running reports in medium trust, even from those awfully nice people at DevExpress. We are working on reducing these as much as we can. First of all, here's the definitive article from MSDN that explains all about medium trust in ASP.NET 2.0. The current limitations are:
- Running end-user scripts, or loading a report from a REPX file or a stylesheet from a REPSS field is not allowed under medium trust, since they all involve compiling code in some sense and that's not allowed.
- Creating 3D Charts is also not allowed since we use the OpenGL rendering library, another no-no.
- Exporting to a metafile or rendering an XRChart control as a metafile (its XRChart.ImageType property must be set to ChartImageType.Bitmap)
- Exporting to a PDF when you have to embed fonts. Only characters from 32 to 255 are allowed in medium trust.
- XRRichText and XRPivotGrid controls aren't supported.
As you can see, providing you avoid some high-end features, XtraReports will suit your medium trust environment down to the ground. Give your hosting company a break and use XtraReports for your web application's reporting needs.