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.