As Microsoft goes on rampage shortening their release time and sending not one but 3 versions in the last 6 years (2012, 2014, 2016!), it is time for us to have a look at various methodologies available to migrate reports from one ReportServer to another ReportServer. The reason I have brought this up is because for all my working career, the only tool that I had used to migrate reports is RSSScripter.exe. The original link is archived and is available from the following link – RS Scripter. This one works good for till SQL Server 2008 R2. What about the versions after that?

That’s the answer I want to solve through this post. In my quest to find out how to build a a package ready for deployment and further automating it, one of the first that I have got hands on is this – SSRS Powershell Deploy.

It’s bunch of powershell scripts that can be utilized to deploy the reports. The biggest downside to this method though is you can’t pick and chose the reports to deploy. You either deploy all or none at all. If the solution can be analyzed well enough, we may come up with a workaround for that. For now, let’s deep dive into, how to set the solution up and steps involved in deploying –

Once you open the link, click on ‘SSRS-1.3.0.zip’ folder. Follow the below steps –

1. Download the .zip from https://github.com/timabell/ssrs-powershell-deploy/releases/latest
2. Right-click the zip file in windows explorer, click “properties”, and then click “Unblock”.
3. Create folder ‘Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\’
4. Open up the zip file, copy the SSRS folder, paste it into
`Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\`. (Or somewhere on your
`$env:PSModulePath`)

You can test if you are having the modules imported or not by running a simple powershell command as shown below –

As the names imply, if you want to deploy the SSRS Project (i.e. .rptproj file), then use Publish-SSRSProject else if you want to deploy the SSRS Solution (i.e. .sln file) then use Publish-SSRSSolution.

Using this let’s do one sample report deployment. I will first show a simplest way to deploy i.e. by using pre-filled Configuration data.. I have a project OpenDataReports containing one report ‘Top 10 Products.rdl’.

Once the solution is opened, go to Project-><<ProjectName>> Properties. The properties page opens up.
Perform the following changes as shown below –
Configuration – Set it to Release
TargetServerURL – http://<<MachineName>>/ReportServer<<_InstanceName>&gt;
In addition to that the other settings can be set as well, i.e. TargetDatasetFolder, TargetDataSourceFolder etc.

With the properties set, now right-click on the Project and click on ‘Rebuild’ as shown below. Ensure it succeeds. –

Go to the project path and /bin/Release folder to ensure all the required reports and Data Sources are present. In my case here are the contents in the folder –

Finally the next step is to run the powershell command as shown below –

The command to run is a simple one –

Publish-SSRSProject -Path "<<FilePath>>\OpenDataReports.rptproj" -Configuration Release -Verbose

That’s the simple way to go about deploying reports. Of course, one need not do the pre-config settings, if you look at all the parameters provided for the script, each of the project parameters can be set at run time. I will posting a example of that in the next post.

Meanwhile, do leave a comment on how deployments are happening in your environments.