My QA folks have a problem; development has been working on migrating a bunch of reports from a legacy 3rd-party application to SQL Server Reporting Services. Development has finished their “sprint” (*cough* waterfall), and handed over 52 reports to QA, and told the to load them into their QA server. The problem? The web interface only loads 1 report at a time.

Me, being the DevOps guy that I am, thought “well, that’s just silly; there has to be a way to upload all of the reports at once, rather than clicking on some silly buttons over and over again”. I googled, and the best explanation I found was at this blogpost: https://basic-ssrs.blogspot.com/2015/12/upload-multiple-rdl-files-from-local.html (Kudos; this is a VERY well written walk-through).

Unfortunately, I did exactly what the blog suggested, and ran into two problems. The first? Running the .bat file opened and closed a command window in seconds. No feedback. Nothing. I went back and made a minor change to the .bat file; namely, I added the PAUSE command to the end:

“E:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\130\Tools\Binn\rs.exe” -i C:\report_upload\Upload_Multiple_RDL_files.rss -s “http://localhost/reportserver” -v FILE_NAME=”C:\report_upload\ConfigurationFile.txt”
pause

This allowed me to discover the second (more important) issue; I ran the .bat file, and now I get the following error:

Unhandled exception:
The definition of this report is not valid or supported by this version of Reporting Services. The report definition may have been created with a later version of Reporting Services, or contain content that is not well-formed or not valid based on Reporting Services schemas. Details: ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 2563, position 10.

Ummmmm, what?

Back to the Bing. I found another article that describes basically the same process, but at the bottom of the comment section, there was this little gem:

Hello, I was getting the invalid content error:

“….or contain content that is not well-formed or not valid based on Reporting Services schemas. Details: ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character….”

Made some research and found that arrays in vb are created as N+1 long size, and filled with 0x00, so you need to change the script to:

definition = New [Byte](stream.Length – 1) {}

 to get it working.

https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3255/sql-server-reporting-services-ssrs-rsexe-utility/

BINGO! Went back to the .rss file and changed the below code block to

 ‘ Deploying the Reports

                    Try

                        Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenRead(fileFullPath)

                        Dim NameWithExt As String = fileFullPath.Replace(path, “”)

                        Dim NameOnly As String = NameWithExt.Replace(“.rdl”, “”)

                        definition = New [Byte](stream.Length-1) {}

                        stream.Read(definition, 0, CInt(stream.Length))

Ran the.bat, and in just a few minutes, I had a ton of reports loaded to my directory. Now I just gotta fix the datasources.

**Edit – based on comment below, I’ve embedded the entire revised script.

‘ Script Starting Point
' Script to deploy report to report server
' EXECUTE VIA COMMAND LINE
‘ Original script: https://basic-ssrs.blogspot.com/2015/12/upload-multiple-rdl-files-from-local.html
‘ Upload_Multiple_RDL_files.rss

DIM definition As [Byte]() = Nothing
DIM warnings As Warning() = Nothing

Public Sub Main()

' Variable Declaration
        Dim TextLine As String = ""
        Dim LocalDir As String = ""
        Dim ServerDir As String = ""
        Dim definition As [Byte]() = Nothing
        'Dim warnings As Warning() = Nothing

' Reading Configuration Text file and assigning the values to variables
        If System.IO.File.Exists(FILE_NAME) = True Then
            Dim objReader As New System.IO.StreamReader(FILE_NAME)
            Do While objReader.Peek() <> -1
                TextLine = objReader.ReadLine()
                Dim parts As String() = TextLine.Split(New Char() {","c})
                'TextLine & objReader.ReadLine() '& vbNewLine
                LocalDir = parts(0)
                ServerDir = parts(1)

                Dim path As String = LocalDir
                Dim fileEntries As String() = Directory.GetFiles(path)
                Dim fileFullPath As String = ""
                For Each fileFullPath In fileEntries


 ' Deploying the Reports
                    Try
                        Dim stream As FileStream = File.OpenRead(fileFullPath)
                        Dim NameWithExt As String = fileFullPath.Replace(path, "")
                        Dim NameOnly As String = NameWithExt.Replace(".rdl", "")
                        definition = New [Byte](stream.Length-1) {}
                        stream.Read(definition, 0, CInt(stream.Length))

      warnings = rs.CreateReport(NameOnly, ServerDir, True, definition, Nothing)

      If Not (warnings Is Nothing) Then
        DIM warning As Warning
        For Each warning In warnings
        Console.WriteLine(warning.Message)
        Next warning
      Else
       Console.WriteLine("Report: {0} PUBLISHED!", NameOnly)
      End If

     Catch e As IOException
      Console.WriteLine(e.Message)
     End Try
    Next fileFullPath
   Loop
         Else

            Dim MsgBox as String = "File Does Not Exist"

        End If
End Sub

'End of the Script