RenderFormat.IsInteractive and RenderFormat.Name - Develop export aware SSRS reports

It's said that sometimes "Big things come in small packages". This quote perfectly suits the new enhancement in SSRS 2008 R2, which is the newly introduced global variable "RenderFormat". Name and IsInteractive properties provides programmatic access to the name and feature capacity of rendering extension within the definition of the report. The main advantage is that one can create multiple version of the same report using the same report definition.

When the report is processed by a particular rendering extension, with the use of these properties is becomes possible to create report output that is suitable to be displayed by the application that hosts the file format in which report is saved. For example, one might want to generate a particular form of report output when the report is exported using Excel, and generate another form of report output when report is exported to PDF. Certain parts of the reports may be confidential or trademarks which an organization might classify as "company internal" or "confidential" and the same may be banned from using outside the company intranet. Effectively these should not be available on reports that are exported to other file formats. In such cases these properties can be extremely useful. This is one such example, there are many applications of this global variable and it's properties.

Recently I authored an article on the same topic, and if you want to see a demo of how to apply this concept, you can read this article from here. Please do let me know by your comments on the article, what you feel about the same.