UAC and SSRS

If you are trying to access a local SSRS be sure to run either SSMS or IE as an administrator. This is really poor that a major release of both OS and SQL latter they have still not fixed this.

You can reference here for more detailed steps and read the connect ticket. If your going to tout about building more robust software don't make me run your web browser as an admin!

The worst part of this is when you login with SSMS it gives you no warning, just everything is disabled. It wasn't until I browsed to the report manager and was greated with did it all click:

User 'domain\joeuser' does not have required permissions. Verify that sufficient permissions have been granted and Windows User Account Control (UAC) restrictions have been addressed. 

Setting up SSRS on server with multiple sites

I had to set up SSRS on a server today, which has about six or seven different sites. I went through and configured SSRS, bound the virtual directories to a free IP address, fired up the browser and kaboom!



Firing up google was very frustrating as all the solutions I was finding told me to check permissions. The issue here is most likely due to SSRS defaulting to using http://localhost to access the web services. (If anyone from Microsoft or knows whose responsible for this piece of code it'd be great to give a little bit more detail). How do you tell SSRS to use a different server?

There is a config file in %SQL Install Folder%\MSSQL.*\Reporting Services\ReportManager\RSWebApplication.config.. In side this file you will see some xml which looks like

<ui>
   <reportserverurl></reportserverurl>
   <reportservervirtualdirectory>ReportServer</reportservervirtualdirectory>
   <reportbuildertrustlevel>FullTrust</reportbuildertrustlevel>
</ui>

Perfect right so I enter in the URL for my site, fire up the report manager and....kaboom! This time the site doesn't even load and we get the following error from our log files:

w3wp!diagnostic!6!4/2/2009-12:03:16:: Error loading configuration file: The configuration file contains an element that is not valid. The ReportServerUrl element is not a configuration file

This is a horrible error message and doesn't really indicate what the issue. Turns out that you can have either ReportServerUrl or ReportServerVirtualDirectory. Enter the fully qualified URL for ReportServerUrl and remove the ReportServerVirtualDirectory node. Now we fire up the ReportManager in your favorite web browser...and...it works!

I could have saved many many hours and advil, had the developers done proper error handling. Ahh well hopefully you find this article before you've wasted to many hours.