I have been writing a lot of reports lately, all of them for CRM. IT has been a cool experience because I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get really intimate with SSRS for a while.
The result has been great. I think SSRS is a freakishly great product with really bad documentation. However, as you get things figured out you begin to wonder how you have lived without.
But the point of the story today is the experience I have had trying to integrate the reports in to CRM. Being rather naive I thought I could just use Visual Studio to create an RDL file and then import it in to CRM. Not so. When you try this approach you’ll get a really vague error message. Googling around won’t help much either. The specific search term I kept using was “CRM reports existing file "an error occurred””.
The issue it turns out is a disgreement between CRM and VS about data sources. Visual Studio’s idea is that the data source should be kept separate. This is good because it makes deployment easy – each environment has the same data source with a different (and appropriate) connection string. CRM however wants the data source (the connection string) stored in the RDL directly. I’ve not fully explored this, but it concerns me.
Anyway, if you go off and create a report using the Visual Studio report designer (or any other RDL editor); before you import the file open it (in VS you can right click the file and choose View Code) and look at the DataSource element. If you see ConnectionProperties, ConnectionString, and DataProvider you are good to go. Otherwise you need to create them.
To get the settings to use you can just export an existing CRM report and look at it.
Hopefully, this will save you a few hours of banging your head.