Saturday, November 28, 2009

How to Hide Rendering Extensions in SQL Reporting Services ?

When we generate reports using SQL Reporting Services, the report viewer by default gives some report export options such as WORD, EXCEL, etc. A good mechanism for preventing users from accidently exporting reports to a format that you don’t want (for example, you might know that the report doesn’t render quite right in a particular format) is to mark the extension as “invisible” in the Report Server config file.

The rsreportserver.config file, located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.\Reporting Services\ReportServer\Bin folder, if the default installation location was selected during installation.
The parent element is . Under the Render element is an Extension element for each rendering extension. The Extension element contains two attributes, Name and Type. The important one here is the Visible attribute:

Visible

A value of false indicates that the rendering extension should not be visible in user interfaces. If the attribute is not included, the default value is true.


By setting this attribute to false for a given extension, it will hide the extension from being visible in the Report Viewer control as well as in the delivery configuration pages.

This MSDN documentation explains how to configure a rendering extension: