how to make the changes to the SSRS report take effect

Hi There,

In the development of SSRS report life cycle, we have to make changes to the report frequently. for debug purpose or for other purpose, about how to make the changes to take effect immediately always in my mind.

The following question on the context of i have already deployed the SSRS report before, and now i make changes to the report on the Visual Studio, suppose i do some changes to the parameters or data set.

  1. do we have to add the project to AOT again, Why ?

  2. on the VS, we can right click the project and click deploy menu, according to the output, i can only see that the report is deployed to the SSRS, and it has nothing to do with the AOT, is that right ?

  3. on the VS report project, if i check the properties for a specific report, found that the report is located in the AOT, does it mean that the report is created in the AOT by default, not in our client computer ? if so , why we have to "add the project to the AOT again ?

  4. what’s the purpose for “Tools->Caches->Referesh Element”, is it necessary for us to re-deploy the report on the AOT?

thanks a lot

I you want to go to details of the behavior, you should be aware of that there are differences between versions of AX. I see you’re talking about AX 2012 (because Add to AOT doesn’t exist in older versions), but minor versions are important as well. For example, some changes in this area have been added in AX 2012 R2 CU7.

Re 1.: You usually don’t have to save/build is enough. Nevertheless there are cases when you want to forcibly push things to AOT.

Re 2.: Saving goes to AOT, deployment to the report server.

Re 3.: I have no idea what you mean “located in the AOT”. If you’re looking at Application Explorer, it’s all about AX. But Visual Studio always work with files on disk, i.e. if you start editing a report saved in AOT, it’s first copied to a temporary folder on disk.

Re 4.: It drops cache of AOT elements, so you can see changes done in other sessions. Not related to saving your changes to AOT.

  1. do we have to add the project to AOT again, Why ?

Yes, for the changes made to your VS project of the report you need to add it to AOT. Because when you edit the report again you have to see the previous changes which you had done.

  1. on the VS, we can right click the project and click deploy menu, according to the output, i can only see that the report is deployed to the SSRS, and it has nothing to do with the AOT, is that right ?

All the reports will be deployed on the SQL server Reporting Services. AOT is a place where you can see the VS projects and SSRS reports.

  1. on the VS report project, if i check the properties for a specific report, found that the report is located in the AOT, does it mean that the report is created in the AOT by default, not in our client computer ? if so , why we have to "add the project to the AOT again ?

No, any SSRS report will be created in SQL Server Reporting Services.

  1. what’s the purpose for “Tools->Caches->Refresh Element”, is it necessary for us to re-deploy the report on the AOT?

Re-Deploy of the report in AOT and through right Click of project in VS is the same. For the changes to take effect we need to deploy the report.