Reporting Services - Missing features in SRS 2008

Published on 20 December 2010 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

I recently helped with an interesting problem involving SQL Reporting Services, where features from SRS 2008 were mysteriously missing!

History

The team had created several reports in SQL Server 2005 and used them successfully for years. During their upgrade to SQL Server 2008, they needed to upgrade those reports to the SRS 2008 format.

To clarify, SRS doesn’t support backward compatibility—so if you want to run a report built in 2005 on a 2008 server, it must be upgraded. Thankfully, this is a straightforward process: just open the report solution in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) 2008, and it will upgrade it automatically.

The Problem

The team followed this process, opening their 2005 reports in BIDS 2008. No errors were reported, all reports saved correctly, and they were published to the SRS server without issues. The server rendered them successfully—so the team assumed the reports had upgraded properly.

However, there was a subtle change in how the reports were rendered, and they needed to modify the ConsumeContainerWhitespace property to true to fix the issue.

This is a new property in 2008, but the problem was that when opening the report in BIDS 2008, it was simply not there. They could see it in newly created reports, but their existing ones lacked it entirely.

Diagnosis

My first check was whether they were using the correct version of BIDS—because, as they say, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"—but they confirmed they were. My next step was to verify if BIDS was actually performing the upgrade.

Since a report is just an XML file, I suggested opening it in a text editor to check the schema:

• If it showed http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition, it would be a 2008 report.
• If it showed http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2005/01/reportdefinition, it would still be a 2005 report.

Here’s the kicker: even after the upgrade, the file still identified as a 2005 report! This baffled me—how could SRS 2008 render a 2005 report, and why wasn’t BIDS upgrading it?

Solution

I was about to suggest calling Microsoft—or maybe an exorcist—when re-reading the email thread between the team and me, I spotted the missing clue. They were using .rdlc files, which are designed for client-side rendering.

Here’s why this matters:

• .rdlc files are frozen at the 2005 schema, meaning they never adopt new features from SRS 2008 or later.
• The schema remains stuck on 2005 (no upgrade occurs in BIDS).
• Yet, confusingly, they still render correctly on SRS 2008 and 2008 R2!

The fix was simple: convert from .rdlc to .rdl. This upgraded the reports to the 2008/2008 R2 format, unlocking the new features. The team did just that—and they’ve been happy ever since!