Question : Export MS SQL Report to PDF with Tree Index/TOC and Page Navigation

We have a new client who receives a monthly report in PDF format.  The report can be as many as 4000 pages depending on the level of detail selected.  The report is working and provides exactly what our client wants.  The front end is MS Access 2002, using a form that writes a pass-thru query to MS SQL 2000 based on options selected by the user.  The pass-thru query is then bound to an Access report.  The SQL code alone is over 3 pages of nested queries!

This report has 6 grouping/sorting tiers, which provides a hierarchical summary grouped by the client's Fiscal Year, Type of Business and site location structure (4 levels).  Their former data provider somehow exported this report to PDF with a TOC/Index tree that would appear in a navigation pane in the PDF viewer, allowing them to quickly drill down and jump to to any sort tier based on the selected item in the navigation tree.  (i.e. page 2543 (Loc lvl 1 Code 1512) to page 629 (Loc lvl 3 Code 20) to page 3456 (FY 2005) , and so on.

Currently, we manually index these reports using PDF writer, which takes at least a day of editing each month, for each report  :o(  

I have to assume there is a third party product which can export this report to a PDF document and create an index and page navigation tree which is automatically extracted from the report's Group By/Order By and page numbers.

I am looking for recommendations on a report tool which could provide this feature with virtually seamless effort (once programmed) upon export to PDF.  Cost is not really an issue, as this is a sizable account and a feature which we could use on a large part of our existing report library.

Any suggestions for the best report tool to accomplish this task?  If more than one have this PDF tree index capability, which would you recommend and why?  Again, feature base and integration with MS SQL 2000 has higher priority then cost.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide!

Answer : Export MS SQL Report to PDF with Tree Index/TOC and Page Navigation

As you have a SQL Server License you can use SQL Reporting Services for free.
Benefits:
- Links well to SQL Server data
- Allows Grouping on tabled reports
- Each Grouping level can be visible/hidden based upon user selection
- Export to PDF is simplistic.  Run the report, then select 'Export to PDF'
- Reports can have Document Labels to replicate the TOC/Index you need

The setup of this reporting tool is fairly simple, so you could try it out without wasting too much development time.

HTH