How to: Set Deployment Properties (Reporting Services)

In Report Designer in Business Intelligence Development Studio, you must specify the report server as well as folders for reports and shared data sources so that you can publish the items in a project. You can create multiple named sets for these project properties, so that you can conveniently switch between property sets. Each set of properties is a configuration. For example, you can have a configuration for publishing reports to a test server and a different configuration for publishing reports to a production server.

Use Configuration Manager to create and manage sets of project properties. Configuration Manager is a feature supported by Visual Studio, on which BI Development Studio is based.

Note

Do not confuse this feature with the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, which is used to configure Reporting Services after installation. For more information, see Configuring a Report Server Installation.

In BI Development Studio, the action of publishing reports from a Report Server project or solution is known as deploying reports.

Note

Do not confuse this term with deploying Reporting Services solutions that you develop in SQL Server 2008. For more information about Reporting Services solutions, see Deployment (Reporting Services).

To set deployment properties

  1. Right-click the report project, and then click Properties.

  2. In the Property Pages dialog box for the project, select a configuration to edit from the Configuration list. Common configurations are DebugLocal, Debug, and Production.

    Note

    You can use multiple configurations to switch quickly between different report servers, or between deploy and preview. By default, the DebugLocal configuration displays a report in the local preview window, and the Debug and Production configurations publish the report to a report server.

  3. In StartItem, select a report to display in the preview window or in a browser window when the report project is run.

    Note

    StartItem is required in configurations in which the Deploy configuration manager property is not selected.

  4. In OverwriteDataSources, select True to overwrite the data source on the server each time reports are published, or select False to keep the data source on the server.

  5. In the TargetDataSourceFolder text box, type the folder on the report server in which to place the published shared data sources. The default value for TargetDataSourceFolder is Data Sources. If you leave this value blank, the data sources will be published to the location specified in TargetReportFolder.

  6. In the TargetReportFolder text box, type the folder on the report server in which to place the published reports. The default value for TargetReportFolder is the name of the report project.

    Note

    For a report server running in native mode, you must have Publish permissions on the target folder to publish reports to that folder. Publish permissions are provided through a role assignment that maps your user account to a role that includes publish operations. For more information, see Creating and Managing Role Assignments and Publisher Role. For a report server running in SharePoint integrated mode, you must have Member or Owner permission on the SharePoint site. For more information, see Site and List Permission Reference for Report Server Items.

  7. In the TargetServerURL text box, type the URL of the target report server. Before you publish a report, you must set this property to a valid report server URL. When publishing to a report server running in native mode, use the URL of the virtual directory of the report server (for example, https://server/reportserver or https://server/reportserver). This is the virtual directory of the report server, not Report Manager.

    When publishing to a report server running in SharePoint integrated mode, use a URL to a SharePoint top-level site or subsite. If you do not specify a site, the default top-level site is used (for example, https://servername, https://servername/site or https://servername/site/subsite).

To set Configuration Manager properties

  1. Right-click the report project, and then click Properties.

  2. In the Property Pages dialog box for the project, click Configuration Manager.

  3. In the Configuration Manager dialog box, select the configuration to edit. The currently active configuration is displayed as Active(<configuration>).

  4. In Project Contexts, for each project in the solution, select or clear Build or Deploy.

    Note

    If Build is selected, Report Designer builds the report project and checks for errors before previewing or publishing to a report server. If Deploy is selected, Report Designer publishes the reports to the report server as defined in deployment properties. If Deploy is not selected, Report Designer displays the report specified in the StartItem property in a local preview window.