If you ever happen to be in a situation were you do not have access to or have ‘misplaced’ the SSRS report files (.rdl) and you need to edit one (or more) of the reports on your server, there is an easy way to download the .rdl files.
Follow these easy steps:
- Open SQL Server Management Studio,
- Log on to the Reporting Services Instance that contains the reports you are looking for
- Browser through the directory structure to the report that needs to be updated
- Right-click the report and choose Edit…
- Now follow the prompts to save the file to a destination of your choice
- Open BIDS & create a new project/solution
- Import the (previously) saved .rdl file into your SSRS project.
- Edit away to your hearts content….
I’m not going to ask why you don’t have access to or have misplaced the files in the first place (No source code management? Seriously?). I am sure there are a myriad of reasons that you can come up with. This post merely provides a quick way to recover your files and continue edits/updates that may be required.
Since no version number was mentioned, it should be pointed out that the above technique only works with SSRS 2005. We no longer have access to the catalog via SSMS in SSRS 2008, unfortunately.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for pointing that out. I’ve updated the post to reflect this observation.
I came across this simple query for pulling the actual RDL XML out of the catalog table. Seems to work in both 2005 and 2008:
SELECT Path, Name,
SourceCode = CAST(CAST(content AS VARBINARY(max)) AS XML)
FROM ReportServer.dbo.Catalog
WHERE Type IN (2,6)
ORDER BY Path, Type, Name
Got it from here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/thread/0cd1a40a-1987-4712-80c8-e876df4daf86/
This worked perfectly. I did not lose the report, rather, a co-worker made the initial report and he was out when I was asked to modify it. Thanks!