Howto restart MSRS on changed files in Extended Datareader

Question

I'm using Microsoft Reporting Services (SSRS) 2008 with an Extended Datareader/Dataset Provider (i.e. using a Datareader that I wrote myself and integrated it in SSRS). Everytime I have an update (i.e. copy the new binary files to the bin folder in SSRS), I manually have to restart the service.

I saw in IIS that the mechanism used in SSRS is similar to the IIS, but the IIS has a filewatcher and restarts automatically (or at least loads the new dlls/configs automatically) if files changed.

My question is if there is a mechanism (ideally integrated in SSRS already) that does the same for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008?

If not, what would be other options to handle this?

Answer 1

Seeing as no one is having a go at answering I'll have a stab could you not develop a small windows service that monitors the directory for file updates using the FileSystemWatcher in .net and then programatically restarts the SSRS service? You may be able to invoke a restart using WMI Check here if not then you possibly could run a net stop and net start command e.g.

net stop ReportServer$SQL2008
net start ReportServer$SQL2008

you may need to change the service name to match

Hope this helps

OneSHOT

Answer 2

If you copying over binaries that are in use, then you'll need to stop the service before copying anyways. Which would mean more of a deployment script/app than a file watcher.

You can also use the ServiceController to stop and start services based on the name. So it wouldn't be that difficult to stop the service, push the new binaries and then start the service back up.

Here is an example for the service stopping and stopping.