Reporting Service and Source Control

Hi

We have encountered a problem using source control with reporting services. Im writing this post to find out whether we are doing something wrong, or reporting service just don't store everything in source control.

My problem is as follows.

My collegue creates a report with a dataset and this report contains several parameters. He tests this, deploys it, and checks it into the source control through Visual Studio.

The following day I get responsibility to alter something in this report. I checks out everything from source control, starts Visual Studio. But... A few important things are missing. The credentials for the dataset for once (this is a minor issue) since these might not should be stored in source control anyways. What is worse is that all the parameter settings are missing. What was entered was a query to a stored procedure where e.g 5 parameters in the report was mapped to parameters in the stored procedure. Now the query has been changed to text type, and the parameter mapping is missing.

This does make it impossible to cooperate on creating reports. If I now make a change in the parameter configuration, my collegue won't receive this when synchronizing source control, and the risk of deploying something incorrect is too high.

Can anyone help enlighten us. Are we doing something wrong? Is there some manual step that needs to be done to ensure that everything is stored in source control? Or is it just something we have to live with, not being able to trust source control when doing Reporting Services?

Best regards

/Anders

After a little more thourough investigation I have found out what have caused this.

The credentials in the dataset (.rds) is not stored in source control. As i mentioned above this is actually ok, since credentials should not be stored in clear text in source control.

But, if you "forget" to enter the credentials before opening a report (.rdl), this report will "reset" the settings for the strored procedure, and changing the dataset to text type instead of stored procedure.

The current solution for us, is to close the report without saving it, enter correct credentials, and then reopen the report fresh from source control. Then all is as it should be.

I will not consider this to be an actual bug, but i definitely find it to be a inappropriate behaviour. In my world it would be nice for reporting services just to state that the dataset cant be loaded - but it should definitely not alter my report just because of that.

But now the post is here - if anyways encounters the same "problem". I willl expect this to happen only the first time a new collegue should work on a report solution, since after this he will have correct credentials entered, and thus not encounter this strange behaviour.

Best regards

/Anders