RDLC files deploying and size

Question

I'm working on a projet where I'm going to store a lot (150) of RDLC reports that I need to deploy. This files are in .rdlc format. Could a number this big of files be a concern for the size of the deployed application, could there be issues regarding compiling time ?

Answer 1

This honestly is a hard question to answer without having all the necessary information.

There is a big chance that having 150 rdlc files is a bit excessive and it might be possible to reduce that number if some of the rdlc reports are similar.
However if these are separate reports and there is no easy way to substantially reduce this number by using subreports for example. Then I believe there should not be any real problem in deploying all of them. You could define them as a resource and have them built to a specific folder. Depending on the environment you should perhaps try and have a shared space to store them. When you're making a web application then the size of this folder shouldn't even matter at all.
The positive side of having different rdlc files is that actually showing the reports should take less effort. You only have to compile once, if you chose not to copy them on build time then this shouldn't slow this down at all.

If many of these reports are just to show some data from queries then I believe there are better solutions than rdlc reports. But if this is a big project than it's rather normal to have a large amount of reports so having this many files shouldn't be a problem at all.

I hope this answered at least some of your questions. If you need any more specific advice, please provide some more information and I'll see what I can do.

Answer 2

The number of files per se won't be an issue. The size of an RDLC file depends on the complexity of the report (mainly the number of elements being displayed and the number of fields in the data set) since it's just an XML file.

Compile time will not be part of the equation. RDLC files are not compiled when you build the site. They're essentially configuration files for the ReportViewer control so it knows how to render your report. In fact, you can replace an RDLC file in a compiled, deployed web site without recompiling (if the RDLC is the only thing that changed, naturally; I've done that to add columns to a report table where the column existed already in the DataSet, but we just forgot to put it in the table to display). Beyond that, you can even generate RDLC files on the fly. Check this out: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/705248/Generating-RDLC-Dynamically-for-the-Report-Viewer

As to whether it's a problem for the size of your application - well, I don't see how any of us could say. What's the total size of these files? As to whether it's the best solution, again, we can't tell. The number of files really isn't an issue in and of itself, but are these really different reports, or are some so similar that you could combine dozens of them into a single report? Report parameters can come in handy for making small changes to very similar reports.

That's about all I can say with the given information.