SSRS 2005 Exception not being exposed

Question

We are using SSRS 2005 SP1 and the lastest Reportviewer controls. We are having situations where certain reporting infrastructure exceptions are not being exposed to any of the exception handling routines.

A specific example is when the SQL Server Reporting Services Windows service was unexpectantly stopped due to a VM issue. In this case, the report rendered correctly but when displayed to the user within the report viewer web control, the user sees the following message instead of the report:

An error has occurred during report processing.

The Report Server Windows service 'ReportServer$MSSQL2005' is not running. The service must be running to use Report Server.

The problem is that we are catching exceptions in all possible locations: all page behind methods, ReportViewer OnReportError, and application OnError handlers. At no point are we seeing and exception being raised to the client code. Running in the debugger, the exception is being throw during the execution but is not never raised to the consumer client code.

Has anyone ever seen this?

Answer 1

I saw something similar to this in reporting services 2008 where I was trying to catch certain types of exceptions. No one else replied to my question either.

What I did learn after asking this question however might be helpful to you. I went and used reflector and poked around certain DLLs. I search for specific strings I saw and found that Reporting Services seems to catch its own exceptions and just throw back strings out so there's not much you could do about this sort of problem short of hacking the DLL itself. This works other than you'd have to remove the strong-name validation and make it completely unmaintainable.

Answer 2

Thanks for your response Bob. It's surprising and a disappointment that SSRS is eating those exceptions. We will probably stay away from hacking the dll and try to figure out a way to monitor and alert from the SSRS internal logs.