[2015-Dec-24] My story: two SSRS items (main report and its sub-report) need to be deployed to SharePoint. Trivial task, and even if I need to locate sub-report to a different SharePoint document library or folder I can easily do that during a development phase or using Report Builder after deployment by specifing relative or absolute path for sub-report within a definition of the main report. And here is a good MSDN resource about this - Specifying Paths to External Items (Report Builder and SSRS).
But with multiple environments to deploy the very same set of SSRS items to adjust will be a time consuming task. However we can prepare and adjust SSRS XML files during the time of deployment and PowerShell is one of the many ways to achieve that.
Here is a top section of the main SSRS RDL file:
And here how this very same section may look like with the absolute path for its sub-report in a targeted deployment SharePoint environment:
And portion of a PowerShell script that does it all is very simple:
So, at the end of the day, it's a win-win situation both for Development and Deployment teams: less time for deployment and more time to develop other things.
[2015-Dec-30] A brief update for the PowerShell script. I needed to make it more flexible to support sub-report paths update wherever they are located within their main SSRS report. So I had to change my XML way of dealing with the RDL report file to a text file way (XML file is still a text file :-).
And I changed this part of the code:
# update of the connection string to the found sourcing Excel files [xml] $xdoc = get-content $rptReference # Getting to the $rsr_environment XML block $SubReports= $xdoc.Report.ReportSections.ReportSection.body.ReportItems.Subreport foreach($SubReport in$SubReports) $SubReport_New= $SubReport $SubReport_New.ReportName =$targetDataSources+"/"+$SubReportFolder+"/"+$SubReport_New.ReportName+".rdl" $xdoc.Report.ReportSections.ReportSection.body.ReportItems.ReplaceChild($SubReport_New,$SubReport) $xdoc.Save($rptReference)
To this:
(Get-Content$rptReference).replace('<ReportName>','<ReportName>'+$targetDataSources+"/"+$SubReportFolder+"/") |Set-Content $rptReference (Get-Content$rptReference).replace('</ReportName>','.rdl</ReportName>') | Set-Content $rptReference
And it worked like a magic, regardless of how many sub SSRS reports a main report could have and their locations in there!
