Someone asked me a long time ago how to do watermarking in Reporting Services and I meant to write a blog about it. Then I was asked again just yesterday. So, I figured it was worth a quick blog. In this quick blog, I will show you how to use an image that appears in the background of the report. An assumption is made that you already have an image that can be used as a watermark.

I fired up BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio for those of you that are new to BI) and added a new report from my template. I added a quick dataset to my report and threw a table with a few values. Did some slight formatting and then added the image that I planned to use as a watermark. Figure 1 below shows an example before I add the watermark.

Figure 1: Before Watermarking

Now here is where I need to set the watermark. I selected a white area of my report in the report design surface to ensure that I had the report body selected and hit F4 to show the properties. Then, I just set Source to “Embedded” and selected my newly added watermark image as the Value. Finally, I wanted the watermark to repeat, so I selected Repeat under the BackgroundRepeat property. My settings are shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Body Background Image Settings

Instantly, I see the results of my actions in the Report Designer as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Watermark

This has been a pretty simple demonstration of how to add a watermark, but I hope that you enjoyed it none-the-less. And if you don’t already, please be sure to follow me on twitter at @briankmcdonald. Also note that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my blogs or find me using any of the below methods.