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Is there anyway to have more control over Report Manager, is seems bizzare for such a sophisticated product to allow next to no control over the report manager section other than rename folders and place reports and report parts in these folders, as far as im aware I cannot even move them around and place them in any sort of order.

It would be nice if I could change the colour of folders and move them around freely.

Does anyone have any customization tips or control suggestions I may have missed for giving more control over this area to developers?

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JsonStatham
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  • You need to click "Details View" on the right. – JonH Feb 22 '12 at 14:04
  • All that does is show me any report parts that I have se to 'hidden' – JsonStatham Feb 22 '12 at 15:23
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    but you are dealing with the "portal" have you for reporting services. You can easily use reporting services object model and wrap the reports in your own user interface. The manager is basically a web based way to add / remove / rename the reports or the data sources. Its like having your windows UI to get to your folders. My suggestion is if you want something very customized to probably write up your own container and then place the reports in the container. – JonH Feb 22 '12 at 16:30

2 Answers2

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You can mess around a little bit with the SSRS stylesheets, but no, customization of Report Manager is not supported. SSRS is about the reports. Any sophisticated control or UI of the reports is beyond the scope of the SSRS product. On the other hand, there are some sophisticated JQuery techniques that could work for this sort of page manipulation if you want to dive into the Report Manager page structure.

(Stylesheets are at Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10_50.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportManager\Styles in a default 2008 R2 install. Customization is not supported.)

I suspect that the use of Report Manager (as a percentage of total SSRS users) is far beyond what was originally imagined for the product. It is called the Report Manager, after all.

Consuming the web service in .NET or using URL report access are straightforward methods to deliver the reports through any interface you can build.

Jamie F
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As Jamie says, customization of Report Manager is not very easy. A few techniques are discussed here:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/12/12/reporting-services-add-a-logo-to-the-report-manager.aspx

If you want something flexible, I am working on an alternative open-source front-end for SSRS, called CrissCross:

https://github.com/codeulike/crisscross

Currently CrissCross is focused on better multi-pick widgets and better support for reports with many parameters. But as its open-source, you can use it as a foundation to build whatever you want.

codeulike
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  • codeulike, I've tried to open the solution on VS2k5 and it doesn't work. Would you be able to generate a version that would work on 2005 as well? Thanks Dan –  Mar 27 '12 at 06:08
  • @Dan, maybe try this: http://www.fsmpi.uni-bayreuth.de/~dun3/archives/downgrade-vs-2008-sln-or-csproj-to-vs-2005-project-solution/139.html or this http://sourceforge.net/projects/vspc/ to convert the solution. – codeulike Mar 27 '12 at 09:36
  • CrissCross looks like it could be incredibly useful to solve a problem we have at our SAAS company: generating reports that fit our L&F. – John Zabroski Sep 19 '13 at 04:41