looking for best practices for RS and source safe

  • I'm looking for best practice recommedations (or just a good assortment of choices) for how to save reports in a tool like source safe? 

    I've just deployed my first production reporting services installation.  The process of deploying reports through alpha, beta and production environemnts seems to work best for me to use the RDLs and the import feature instead of trying to deploy from visual studio.  But this leaves me with a question.

    I'm struggling with deciding if the whole project has to be saved or just the RDLs. 

    What is everyone else doing to save reports and make them available for future altering and redeployment? 

  • In Visual Studio you can setup different configurations (debug, release, etc...) that point to different servers. You just select the configuration and choose deploy.

    What I've come up with is to have all the reports in one project. It was getting very messy having multiple Report Projects in the solution. The whole solution is under source control. I deploy the reports to an "Upload" folder on the Reports Server. Then I move the reports to relevant folders via Report Manager. All the datasources stay in the "upload" folder, this avoids duplication.

    At some stage I'll get around to setting up a deployment script using the RS.EXE that does the uploading and moving in a more automated manner, but hey who has spare time these days

     

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    Colt 45 - the original point and click interface

  • I never thought of creating one folder for report 'deploys' and then moving them after with report manager.  Manageing the multiple locations to deploy to from the projects was one of the reasons I chose not to go through the deploy process and instead just upload the RDLs.  But my process leaves me with the problem of RDSs that won't upload in the same manor. 

    The multiple projects didn't seem to make sense to me either but I was actually hoping not to save ANY solution/project in source safe and only put the RDLs and RDSs in source safe.  In order to get developers started (who aren't all familiar with visual studio to begin with) I gave them directions for setting up one report solution on their desktop and using the add existing feature to add reports to that one project as they edit them. Then they can delete that report from their project as they move the RDL back to source safe and it gets deployed.

    Thanks for sharing your process.

     

  • We don't use SourceSafe, but a product called Harvest. We store the report RDL file (and associated stored procedures).

    For deployment I have written a small utility which deploys a collection of RDL files to a specified server (controlled via XML config files). You are quite welcome to have a copy. Drop me your email address and I'll send you it.

    Thanks

    Karl

  • We also don't use SourceSafe; but Perforce instead.  We have set up a structure for SSRS, SSIS and other code and/or scripts that our project requires.  All builds are done daily, automatically, from the CM respository and built to whatever target server is specified (development, test, production) as required.


    Cheers,

    david russell

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