Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

9.1. Understanding the Publishing Process

Before you move on to creating custom deployment solutions, you should understand what happens under the cover when a report and the related files are deployed in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder. After you have designed and tested your reports, you can use Report Designer in BIDS to publish or deploy them to a report server instance.

In Reporting Services, the terms publish and deploy are interchangeable.

9.1.1. Just Publish It!

One of the first steps you need to take to publish a report is to set the TargetDataSourceFolder, TargetReportFolder, and TargetServerURL properties in a business intelligence project. As discussed earlier in this book, these properties point to fully qualified URLs of a SharePoint site and document libraries that contain the reports and related files. Although the publishing process may seem simple at first glance, there is more to it than just moving the content.

First, the authoring tool validates reports and related files before they are added to the destination document libraries. If you bypass this process by uploading the reports and related files directly (via browser or Explorer views) to a SharePoint library, the validation check never occurs. This means you never know if your reporting files are valid until either you manually access them or a background process such as snapshots, subscriptions, or a caching facility references them. Second, when you publish a shared ...