How you deploy your reports (with Reporting Services)

Question

Which one you choose?

• Use the Deploy feature in VS
• Build a rss script and execute it through rs.exe
• Build a deployment package
• Another option

Keep in mind that in many of your environments the report developers/designers don't have publish role in Reporting Server.

Answer 1

In Dev, we use the deploy feature in VS. In Prod, our Prod support team will either upload them manually from the ReportServer website (if it's just one or two reports) or use a simple report upload utility that we wrote. The utility uses the SSRS web service.

Answer 2

For the developers we have a custom built ReportDeployer where we choose what environment to deploy to (development, test, production) and branch to deploy from (also development, test, production). There is a config file with all the reports available for deployment along with their directory structure.

For production builds, the ReportDeployer has a command line interface and our build script pulls the latest reports from the Prod branch in TFS, then deploys all using our custom app.

Answer 3

Similar question here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/468674/deploying-sql-server-reporting-services-reports-on-production-boxes

The scripter tool is definitely an alternative for building the rss script.

Answer 4

Developers can publish to development using the deploy command in visual studio. Admins move the reports from dev to prd with rsscripter.