Force SSRS 2008 to use SSRS 2005 CSV rendering
- by Kash
We are upgrading our report server from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2008 R2.
I have an issue with CSV export rendering for SSRS 2008 where the SUM of columns are appearing on the right side of the detail values in 2008 instead of the left side like in 2005 as shown in the below blocks.
117 and 131 are the sums of Column2 and Column3 respectively.
SSRS 2005 CSV Output
Column2_1,Column3_1,Column2,Column3
117,131,1,2
117,131,1,2
117,131,60,23
117,131,30,15
117,131,25,89
SSRS 2008 CSV Output
Column2,Column3,Column2_1,Column3_1
1,2,117,131
1,2,117,131
60,23,117,131
30,15,117,131
25,89,117,131
I understand that the CSV renderer has gone through major changes in SSRS 2008 R2 with the support for charts and gauges and more importantly it provides 2 modes: the default Excel mode and Compliant mode. But neither mode helps fix this issue. The Compliant mode was supposed to be closest to that of 2005 but apparently it is not close enough for my case.
My Question:
Is there a way to force SSRS 2008 fall back a report to a backward compatibility mode so that it exports into a 2005 CSV format?
Solution tried:
a) Using 2005-based CRIs
Based on this article on ExecutionLog2, if SSRS 2008 R2 encounters a report whose auto-upgrade is not possible (e.g. reports that were built with 2005-based CustomReportItem controls), those particular reports will be processed with the old Yukon engine in a "transparent backwards-compatibility mode".
It seems like it falls back to its previous version mode (2005) and attempts to render it.
So I tried using a 2005-based barcode CustomReportItem and deployed to a SSRS 2008 R2 report server, but it shows the same result as before though it suppressed the barcode. This would be because SSRS 2008 R2 finds a way to suppress part of the report output and displays the rest.
It would be great to find a 2005-based CRI that makes SSRS 2008 R2 process it with its old Yukon engine.
Please note that quite possibly, even if it uses the "old Yukon processing engine", it might still use the new CSV renderer hence it shows the same output. If that is true, then this option is moot.
b) Using XML renderer
We can use a custom XML renderer and then use XSLT to convert the xml to appropriate CSV but this would mean that we need to convert all our 200 reports. Hence this is not feasible.
Please note that we do not have the option of having SSRS 2005 and SSRS 2008 R2 deployed side by side.
