How does the report viewer interact with SSRS?

Question

I am working on an extranet solution that will contain some SSRS reports. We tend to use a report viewer to display reports to the end user.

What I cannot find out is exactly the way it is done. The client web browser will display the report, but where will it get the data from? Is the client browser direct access to the SSRS web service or the web server hosting the report viewer that retrieves data from SSRS?

What it boils down to is whether my SSRS server should be visible on the Internet or if this is enough if the web server can reach the SSRS server.

Answer 1

The SSRS connection is made from the web server, nothing from the client.
The client makes postbacks to the web server with each update, the advice is to put the ReportViewer in the UpdatePanel so that it can be updated using AJAX and not reload the entire page.