Reporting Services and Virtual Directories, a Warning

Just a very quick post to make people aware of a little thing that happens with reporting services when you install it on a server and install it under the same virtual directory (e.g. you install it on a SharePoint server and don't allow SharePoint to control the reporting server, e.g. when you have Performance Point Server 2007 CTP4 and are using it with reporting services - mail me if it's confusing).

We found that Report Manager (http://servername:1234/reports) worked correctly but any access via the web service (http://servername:1234/reportserver) would return an error along the lines of...

Microsoft.ReportingServices.UI.WebControlConnection,
ReportingServicesWebUserInterface, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91 does not implement
IReportServerConnection or could not be found

Spurious to say the least. The solution for us was to remove a couple of lines from the web.config file within the <appsettings> tag in the reporting services virtual directory...

<add key="ReportViewerServerConnection"
value="Microsoft.ReportingServices.UI.WebControlConnection,
ReportingServicesWebUserInterface, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" />
  <add key="ReportViewerTemporaryStorage"
value="Microsoft.ReportingServices.UI.ReportViewerTemporaryStorage,
ReportingServicesWebUserInterface, Version=9.0.242.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" />

This gets the web service running but guess what, reports via the report manager won't work anymore.

The problem, I am reliably informed on 'tinternet, is that web config's are inherited in IIS therefore the reporting services web service web config settings are inherited from the report manager web config which means that the setting you removed is needed for report manager but breaks the web service.

The solution, is to add the values back into the web config for the report manager but make sure that the web config for the web service virtual directory has the value...

<appSettings>
    <clear/>
</appSettings>

Hey presto, both the report manager and the web service now function correctly.

Apologies if my descriptions of web things are a little on the vague side but I'm reading it as it happens.

Technorati tags: Reporting Services, IIS, web.config, web service