Visual Studio for SSRS 2008 - How to organize reports into subfolders in Solution Explorer?

Question

Right now I have a project called reports with several reports. In solution explorer it looks like this:

Shared Data Sources
 -- DEV
Reports
 -- Report1
 -- Report2
 -- Report3

I want to make it look like this and have the same structure carry over to the report manager website when I click deploy.

Shared Data Sources
 -- DEV
Folder A
 -- Report1
Folder B
 -- Report2
 -- Report3

Anyone know how to do this?

Solution 1

We manage this with Linked Reports in SSRS. We deploy reports to a Report Distribution folder, hidden from users, then create Linked Reports in the Reporting Services web UI (an option in the Manage section for each report). You can create the Linked Report in any folder, so you can build the folder structure you want and put the linked reports in the appropriate place.

You can deploy everything to the single distrib folder from VS, and the linked reports are updated. This solves the sub-report and DataSource issues since all reports 'run from' the distrib folder. There's obviously a lot of setup up front, and creating a new environment is a hassle - It happens so infrequently that we haven't tried to automate it.

Solution 2

The way do it is similar to other posters, I have one solution with multiple projects (each project is named and put into the same folder name that I want it deployed under).

Then I rigged up a script in RS which:
- Creates a single data source used by all reports, in my case
- Loops through all directories in the solution folder
-- Creates the same folder name on the RS server
-- Deploys all files in this directory to that folder on the RS server
-- Uses rs.SetItemDataSources on each report to redirect it to my main data source

And that's basically it.

Caveats are you sometimes get files uploaded you didn't want to (like deleted reports with the .RDLs still hanging around). But you can script all around that, or just blow it away in RS and re-upload again.

Doing this, I have one script but can deploy a structure under numerous different parent folders, each with different data sources, and have all the reports in a folder drawing data from a different database. This lets me run 1x RS instance but have development, testing, training, etc areas.

Solution 3

I have a BI project going in SSRS2008 with roughly 80 reports - and this is my experience with deploying reports into folders. This is my first foray into developing in Reporting Services, so any gurus please smack me if I'm out to lunch.

Initially, I used folders in source control to separate smaller reports by department to help keep me organized. That worked fine while I was initially developing my reports, however the first time I deployed the project to the report server the structure was completely flattened - so I gave up on using a folder structure to organize.

As far as I'm aware the only way you can create a folder structure in SSRS is to use the Report Manager UI and create folders on the Report Server. I'm assuming from there you would modify the path in the report properties in Visual Studio. Either that or you have to define the path when you first set up the report. I haven't tested this so YMMV.

So in conclusion: It is not possible to create the folders in BIDS and deploy your reports into folders utilizing the IDE. I hope this is addressed in 2008R2 because it's kind of a pain having all those reports thrown together in the Solution Explorer.

Solution 4

You can have the files in separate folders on the disk/source control however they list flat and sorted alphabetically in Visual Studio.

I cannot see a user interface to manage the above thing but if you edit the project file (single project file of a VS solution) you can specify the FullPath XML tag of each report file.

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