SSRS 2008 Tutorial: Publishing a Report

Creating reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio is good for developers, but it doesn't help users at all. In order for the reports you build to be available to others, you must publish them to your Reporting Services server. To publish a report, you can use the Build and Deploy menu items in Business Intelligence Development Studio. Before you do this, you need to check the project's configuration to make sure that you've selected an appropriate server for the deployment.

Try It!

You can publish any report, but the first report you created is probably more visually interesting at this point. To publish the first report, follow these steps:

1. Select File > Recent Projects and choose your ProductReport1 project.
2. Select Project „ ProductReport1 Properties.
3. Click the Configuration Manager button.
4. Fill in the Target Server URL for your Report Server. If you're developing on the same computer where Reporting Services is installed, and you installed in the default configuration, this will be http://localhost/ReportServer. Figure 17-7 shows the completed Property Pages.

   

   Figure 17-7: Setting the active configuration

5. Click OK.
6. Select Build > Deploy ProductReport1. The Output Window will track the progress of BIDS in deploying your report, as shown in Figure 17-8. Depending on the speed of your computer, building the report may take some time.

   

   Figure 17-8: Setting report project properties

7. Launch a web browser and enter the address http://localhost/reports.
8. It may take several minutes for the web page to display; Reporting Services goes to sleep when it hasn't been used for a while and can take a while to spin up to speed. Figure 17-9 shows the result.

   

   Figure 17-9: Deploying a report

9. Click the link for the ProductReport1 folder.
10. Click the link for the ProductReport1 report.