Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS)

By: Ray Barley

Overview

Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) provides the capability to deploy reports.  This is very convenient since we use BIDS to design, develop, and test our reports.  In this section we will walk through report deployment using BIDS.

Explanation
In order to deploy our reports and data sources using BIDS, we need to specify some project settings.  Right click on the project name in the Solution Explorer then select Properties from the popup menu; you will see the dialog as shown below:

The following is a description of the deployment settings:

• OverwriteDataSources - specify True or False; when you deploy using BIDS you probably want to choose False so that if the Data Source already exists on the deployment target it does not get overwritten.  The reasoning is that the connection strings in your development environment are probably different than your target deployment server.
• TargetDataSourceFolder - the name of the folder where you want to deploy you Data Sources; the default value is Data Sources.
• TargetReportFolder - the name of the folder where you want to deploy your reports.  The default value is the name of your project.
• TargetServerURL - the URL of your deployment report server; use the format http://SERVERNAME/reportserver where SERVERNAME is the name of the server where you installed Reporting Services.  "reportserver" is the default name; if you manually configured Reporting Services using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager then specify the name you used for the report server.   

After reviewing the deployment settings and making any necessary changes, you can deploy all data sources and reports in the project by right clicking the project in the Solution Explorer and selecting Deploy from the popup menu.  You can deploy specific data sources and/or reports by selecting them in the Solution Explorer (use Ctrl + Click to select multiple), right clicking on a selected item and choosing Deploy from the popup menu.

The success or failure of your deployment will be reported in the Output window; e.g.:

Deploying to http://sql2008test/reportserver
Deploying data source '/Data Sources/AdventureWorksLT'.
Warning : Cannot deploy data source AdventureWorksLT to 
the server because it already exists and OverwriteDataSources 
is not specified.
Deploying report '/SSRS 2008 Tutorial/ReportDesignerExample'.
Deploy complete -- 0 errors, 1 warnings
== Build: 1 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==
== Deploy: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==

After a successful deployment of our sample project, you will see the following on the Report Manager home page:

To navigate to the Report Manager use the URL http://SERVERNAME/reports; if you manually configured Reporting Services using the Reporting Services Configuration Manager then specify the name you used for the Report Manager,   You can click on the Data Sources or SSRS 2008 Tutorial folders to see the data source or the reports.

Now let's continue on to the next section to see how to deploy reports using the Report Manager.