Documenting a Report in SSRS 2008 R2

  • I have not found any places to adequately document a report in SSRS. The only place I see is the Description field in the report properties. I'd like to hear from you if you have an inventive way to properly document a report with items such as Creator, Date Created and Description. More importantly, I'd like to include a running list of dated & descriptive updates to the report.

    In addition, I'd like to also document the purpose of each dataset used in the report. I could do that in the Stored Proc, but I'd like to do it in the SSRS project. Can you share some ideas of how you do it in your projects. Thanks

  • You can get most of what you are looking for by querying <your ReportServer DB>.<schema>.catalog. You can get the RDL/XML by casting the Content column as varbinay then as XML like so:

    SELECT CAST(CAST(CONTENT AS varbinary(max)) AS XML), *

    FROM dbo.[Catalog]

    "I cant stress enough the importance of switching from a sequential files mindset to set-based thinking. After you make the switch, you can spend your time tuning and optimizing your queries instead of maintaining lengthy, poor-performing code."

    -- Itzik Ben-Gan 2001

  • Thank you for that info, Alan. The query does give me a lot of what I'm looking for. The only thing it doesn't offer is a method of documenting the report or dataset with plain text in which I can describe the purpose of the report, which user requested it and an easily readable running description of changes that were requested. For that purpose, I'm looking for a method of creating a running text narrative that can be accessed by current and future developers over time. Unfortunately, the Description field is completely inadequate for my purpose.

    Is anyone out there documenting their reports using the level of detail I'm looking for?

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