Porting SSRS reports from Dev to Production Server

Question

I am sort of new to SSRS development environment and this question may be elementary to quite a few developers who have worked with SSRS for a long time.

Till a few days ago I was developing reports with BIDS on the production server and deploying the reports from with in BIDS.

I have had to move development efforts to a separate development/testing and staging server. After developing and testing these reports I don't want to duplicate the efforts in the BIDS environment on production server.

My plan is to download /copy the .rdl files to the bids environment on production and deploy the reports from there.

Is there any way to edit the .rdl file (which i believe is an XML file basically) from the dev server so that I dont need to create data sources again for the report on production?

I hope I have been able to make the question clear.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated

Regards

Rome'

Note: I don't have access to the production server DB from the dev environment.

Answer 1

This is why data sources don't get overwritten when you deploy a report - so that you can change the connection details of the data source on the production server and have this isolated from report deployment.

Deploy your reports and data sources as normal, then go into the server environment and modify the data sources to connect to your production server. Note you have to edit the data source details anyway because account details and passwords don't get deployed.

You can also deploy reports direct to production from your development environment without having to copy and redeploy from BIDS on the production server.