CODEWITHSUNDEEP
reporting-servicesdevelopment-environment
ImmortalStrawberry
ImmortalStrawberry

Reputation: 6091

SSRS Create development environment from Live server

I've inherited a live SSRS server and have been asked to amend a lot of reports that are on there.

Is there a quick way I can "export" all of the reports/data sources to a local instance so I can develop against it using BIDS?

e.g. Can I copy the ReportServer database from Production? What else would I need to do?

I'd like to be able to have a Development copy of everything, with DataSources pointing to copies of the production databases but with the same names. Therefore I could re-write the report and re-define any SP's required locally, and then just deploy the new RDL to the server along with the ALTER SP scripts.

Is that possible or even sensible!?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2108

Answers (1)

Jeroen
Jeroen

Reputation: 63719

Personally, with the volume you mentioned in the comments (30 RDL's and 3 databases) I wouldn't recommend some automated cloning of the entire Reporting setup from production to local. Instead, I'd suggest the following:

Reports
Go to the web front-end for your reportserver (typically http://yourserver/reports). Find each report, open it, and on the Properties tab click the Edit button. This button does not do what you might expect (edit the report inside the browser), but instead offers you a download of the RDL file. Save all the RDL files in one folder on disk.

With 30 reports manually downloading the reports may take you maybe an hour, max. This will probably beat most automated approaches. And since you should only need to do this step once...

Databases
It's not entirely clear from the question, but if you only have production databases and no DTAP setup yet, now may be a good time to start with that. You could host clones of the 3 production databases on a test server or possibly on your dev environment. Note that the schema's important here (should be the same as production), the data doesn't have to be entirely up to date.

Alternatively you can skip this bit and develop your reports against the production databases, assuming you can create connections from your dev machine to the production databases. Up to you.

Visual Studio / BIDS
This bit has a few parts to it:

  • Create a new reports project and solution in Visual Studio.
  • Add the existing RDL files you've downloaded earlier.
  • Depending on how the reports were set up, you may need to add shared data sources in your project, to get your reports up and running.

After all this, you should be able to preview your reports from Visual Studio (either with data coming from the "cloned" databases, or directly from production).

At this point you should also be able to safely make changes and preview/test them before deploying them.

Be sure to add the solution, reports, etc. to your version control system of choice.

Deployment
Once you've made changes you want to deploy to the reportserver, you have two basic options:

  1. Deploy them using BIDS (see also the deployment properties MSDN page)
  2. Go back to the web front-end, find the report, open the Properties tab again, click the Update button. This allows you to re-upload the RDL file with the changes you've made.

From now on you can just rinse and repeat on making updates and deploying the reports. No need for cloning/exporting the entire SSRS instance to keep things in sync.

Upvotes: 2

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