C H A P T E R 8
Deploying Reports
Throughout the lifecycle of a report—from creation to maintenance—administrators, developers, and
now even end users using Report Builder need to continually deploy reports to the SSRS 2012 server.
Deploying a report simply means uploading the RDL file onto the SSRS 2012 server so that your users
can use it (for more information on the specifics of the RDL format of these reports, see Chapter 3).
Fortunately, SSRS 2012 provides several means for deploying reports:
Using the Report Manager interface through your Web browser: This simple
method allows anyone with an RDL file and the proper SSRS permissions to
upload it to the SSRS 2012 server. This can be especially useful if you’re
developing your report’s RDL files in an application that doesn’t provide you
with a method to upload them to the server. It’s also useful if you want to make
a quick edit of the RDL file—say to change a misspelled word—using an
application such as Notepad, which doesn’t offer a built-in way to upload the
report. We cover this scenario in Chapter 8, where Notepad is used to modify a
report.Using Report Builder 3.0: The Report Builder 3.0 utility was a new feature to
SSRS 2008 R2 and it is still used in SSRS 2012. It provides the user who is
unfamiliar with the Visual Studio IDE with a simple interface by which to create
and edit data sources and reports.Using the Deploy option in BIDS/Visual Studio: This method allows you to
deploy your reports to the SSRS 2012 server from directly within your
development environment. If you’re using BIDS/Visual Studio and have direct
access to the report server to which you want to deploy your reports, this is one
of the easiest options.Using the rs.exe command-line utility: The rs.exe command-line utility is a
runtime environment that is used to execute VB .NET code in the form of
specially formatted script files. You deploy the report in the same way as the
method in the next item of this list. Later in the section “Using the rs.exe
Utility,” we will cover how to deploy reports and create data sources
programmatically using rs.exe.Programmatically, using the SSRS Webservice: This method gives you complete
control over the deployment process with the added advantage of creating any
type of UI you want. Unlike the rs command-line utility, you have your choice
of languages and the full power of Visual Studio 2012 to help you develop your
custom interface. In Chapter 6, we used the SOAP API, otherwise known as the
Report Server Web service, to retrieve report parameter information about