SSRS – Same Report with Different Subscription Names

With RB (and sufficient privilege), users can save reports straight to the Report Manager environment. At that point, they're deployed. But if you want to have them save those reports to a Dev/Test box, and want to push them live, there's a few options.

One easy option is to move reports into a known folder 'For Deployment'. You can then have a script which grabs the RDL for reports in here and uploads them to the proper server. You'll probably want to make sure the data sources are mapped appropriately as this method can annoyingly lose references. You can use rs.exe for your scripts, or just use the web references. PowerShell can be very useful here, as it happily talks WebService, and you can schedule PowerShell scripts using SQL Agent jobs.

1. Find and Replace one of the desired characters, such as an Underscore, in the dataset query SQL with a non-sense string, such as "3145234jhasdf" ..... (minus the quotes).
2. In Report Builder, create a DataSet with the resulting data.
3. Create a Tablix with that DataSet. The headers in the Tablix will now look odd. As an example the header, "Column_One", will now look something like this: "Column3145234jhasdfOne".
4. Save the file on your desktop or other local directory. It will be an RDL file. Close Report Builder.
5. Open the resulting RDL file you saved in a text editor, such as Notepad++. You will see XML code.
6. Find and Replace your non-sense string: "3145234jhasdf", with the character you want it to display your headers: "_".
7. Save the file. Close the text editor.
8. Open the file in Report Builder. Your headers should look like you want it.

You can replace more than one type of character by choosing a different non-sense string for each. For ease, keep the string alphanumeric with no spaces.