The ability to add Templates to SSRS (such as documented here and here and here) is a neat feature. Basically, you just create an RDL and put it in the “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDEPrivateAssembliesProjectItemsReportProject” directory… now you can create a new report starting from the template by selecting it from the “New Items” dialog. This is great when you don’t want to start from scratch on every report.
The only thing I’ve found to be a friction point is that every time someone updates the Template (which you’re storing somewhere in source control) you need to copy it over to that folder. That’s no big deal, but when you have a lot of developers that all have to do that frequently, it’s a pain.
The easy way to solve this is with symlinks. You can’t use a shortcut, but you can create a soft symlink to point back at your template in source control. That way you will always create a report off of the latest version in your repository. (Yeah, you still have to keep that up to date… no getting around that.)
[sourcecode language="bash" padlinenumbers="true" wraplines="true"] mklink "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDEPrivateAssembliesProjectItemsReportProjectTemplatePortrait.rdl" "C:SourceControlframeworksSsrsFrameworkReportingTemplatesTemplatePortrait.rdl" mklink "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDEPrivateAssembliesProjectItemsReportProjectTemplateLandscape.rdl" "C:SourceControlframeworksSsrsFrameworkReportingTemplatesTemplateLandscape.rdl" [/sourcecode]
That’s all there is to it!