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The Most Lacking Feature In SSRS (7 years and no fix?)

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This post is a response to this month's T-SQL Tuesday prompt. T-SQL Tuesday was created by Adam Machanic and is a way for SQL users to share ideas about interesting topics. This month's topic is SQL Server Bugs & Enhancement Requests.


Being a frequent user of SQL Server Reporting Services for the past 6 years has made me blind to the annoyances that I had with the software when I first started using it. For example, I've learned to deal with not being able to easily change the order that reports appear in the Solution Explorer. I am no longer frustrated that I can't change the order of datasets in the Report Data pane. I've grown accustomed to editing the XML of the report to accomplish these annoyances and many others.

Even though I think SSRS is a superb piece of software (no other tool I know of can generate reports so easily with as much flexibility as SSRS) there is one lacking feature that still drives me nuts:

Why can't I organize my reports in sub folders!?

Don't be fooled by my photo manipulating skills, this New Folder button doesn't actually exist in SSRS.

Seriously. Visual Studio allows me to organize my files in sub folders in nearly all other project types: C# console apps? Check. ASP.NET MVC solutions? Check.

Why then can't my SSRS solutions do the same thing?

If you look at the Microsoft Connect for the issue more than 200 people agree. It's ridiculous this functionality isn't built in. Not only does Visual Studio have the capability in other solutions, but reports can be deployed to multiple different folders on the SSRS server itself, leaving the only missing link a context menu action that says "Create New Folder." I know what I'm asking for here is a "basic" change, nothing nearly as complicated as adding an additional QUALIFY filtering clause (which would be great to have too), but that just makes it more reason that this should have been fixed a long time ago!

However, there is a brief glimmer of hope. Microsoft has been releasing updates to SQL Server Data Tools somewhat regularly the past year, including bug fixes and feature requests from Connect feedback. Let's hope they continue to get better about fixing issues like these so that everyone will be able to right click > Create New Folder in their SSRS projects sometime in the near future.

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