Making use of RGDI output

According to the Reporting Services feature matrix, the image output that Report Server Express has is something called RGDI. From what I've gathered, RGDI stands for Remote GDI.

What is the RGDI file format useful for? I don't know the proper file extension to give the file, nor do I know what viewer can view it.

Is there some way to convert the RGDI format to a more universally accepted file format such as .tif, .gif, .jpg, etc...? I'm hoping that I can just capture the binary stream, and convert the stream to a different image format before saving the file.

Thanks!

RGDI is not useful in itself, it's only usable and used by the Winforms report controls in VS 2005.

Thanks
Tudor|||

So you are saying that RGDI isn't available via a call to the Render() web service method to Report Server Express?

In that case, is Report Server Express going to support calling Render with a format of "IMAGE" and return a .tif file? If not, does RS Express support rendering to any sort of image type? The .tif functionality seems pretty useful.

Thanks.

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RGDI is available, but it only works with the WinForms Report Control. It consists of serialized GDI calls, which are not generally useful. The Express Server supports EMF format for printing.

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Brian, I would like to save the results of a Render() in the RGDI format to later be opened using a winforms application that may not have access to our servers.

Is it possible to save the RGDI results and open them later with the ReportViewer in a disconnected environment?