At Trek we’re all about the BI. Just so happens I sit within the BI team so it was no surprise when Steve wanted to go with all the BI tools. PowerPivot and PerformancePoint were already setup before I got there. With SQL 2012 we get an overhauled instance of SSRS in Integrated mode and the newly introduced Power View. SSRS is now a Service App rather than a separate application so it makes deployment a lot easier. I won’t bore you with the details of installing as you can find all sorts of other bloggers walking you through the steps. What most bloggers don’t cover are the details of searching for .rdl’s.
Installation is pretty easy and getting your report libraries up and running are relatively straightforward. We even managed to create a few shared data sources and reports the day we went live. Real “Ready, Fire, Aim” type stuff. We happened to do the install on a Friday so we didn’t really put everything through its paces until Monday. When we began emailing links to rdl’s around we started getting complaints that users couldn’t see these reports. In addition, rdl’s weren’t showing up in search results.
Now what?
Posted this to the technet forums: LINK. Nauzad was pretty helpful in his reply in pointing me in the right direction. Come to find out, rdl’s are not extensions SharePoint search crawls by default. That’s an easy fix. Navigate to Central Admin > Manage Service Apps > Search Service App > File Types > add “rdl” and you’re golden. Kick off an incremental crawl and you should start to see rdl’s showing up in your results.
But I also noticed that only Full Owners, Site Collection Admins, and Farm admins were seeing reports in search results and in the libraries themselves.
Based on my research for the search issue I found that Report Libraries rely heavily on Publishing. Because of this, only those with Full Control rights and Site Collection Admins or Farm admins will see the rdl’s until they’re published, but it doesn’t stop there. You also have to publish the data source file as well. After some trial and error we figured this all out.
It’s relatively easy to get around the publishing requirement. Navigate to the Library Settings > Advanced Settings > check the box for “all users can see draft items.” Doing so will make all reports and data sources viewable as well as surface all reports in search regardless of published status.
For now, we’ve made the intentional decision to leave publishing on as it will allow use to security trim who has access to publish (accurate) reports and provide layer of oversight.
Adventures in Tech 