Reporting Services 2008: Report Templates

If you are working (or have worked) with a Reporting Services project, you know that most of the reports have similar characteristics such as items in header and footer. Are you spending time for adding such similar things for all reports? If yes, this post will be helpful to you.

This process can be speeded up by having a report with all common items as a template. What you have to do is, create a report with all common items and save it as something like ReportTemplate1.rdl.

Once you saved the file, you need to take the RDL file and place in template folder which is {drive}\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject.
Done. Open a Reporting Services project and open Add New Item dialog box. You should see the newly added report as a template. Get it and continue with your report creation.