Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Deploying Reporting Services Reports dependent on X++ helper classes

Today I was having trouble with deploying a custom Reporting Services Report. One of the changes I made to the report was adding a helper class in the AOT and calls a method on this class from one of the data methods within the report.

The deployment was successful, but when I tested the report it threw a Dynamics AX error stating it could not call my custom method. Lucky for me, this customer had Visual Studio installed on the server running SSRS, so I was able to load the Report Library and test it within Visual Studio. The report ran perfectly.

I tried first to delete the report in the Report Manager Web interface, and then redeploy it from scratch. The documentation clearly states:
"Reports often rely on code that is defined in business logic assemblies. During deployment, business logic assemblies, as well as satellite assemblies containing translated resources, are built and deployed to the report server. After the assemblies have been deployed to the report server, the security policy file for the report server is updated to allow.NET Business Connector secure access to the business logic assemblies."
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc519490.aspx

The report still failed with the same error. But since the report worked within Visual Studio I started thinking about whether or not the added X++ class was truly available for any managed code in SSRS. Those of us who work with Enterprise Portal development knows this always isn't true, and you are some times forced to refresh managed code generated from the AOT. So I pulled up the Reporting Services Configuration Manager and picked my instance, connected to it, and restarted it.


Now the report worked perfectly!


I hope this helps someone.