E10 Report Development Prefered Tool, Report Builder, SSDT etc.?

I’m a little out of the loop with SSRS, for the past few years I’ve gone back a step with Epicor software and have been supporting Vantage 8 so it’s been Crystal Reports all the way. I’m now working towards getting my current employer on Epicor 10.2 so for reporting and BI the focus will be on using SSRS (SQL Server 2016).

My work in the past with SSRS has been using Report Builder (and a tiny amount of BIDS). So, with E10 what’s the preferred development environment of users here for altering existing out of the box reports? Also what does Epicor prefer and support?

I’m leaning towards SSDT unless anyone knows of any reason to steer clear of it?

Report Builder is the Tool of Choice and frankly the only option Visual Studio and anything else is just a wrapper around Report Builder. The functionality is exactly the same.

Report builder is woefully sparse.

Does using Visual Studio provide better tools (as an IDE)?

Particularly, an element browser pane. So I can find - and select - those sub-reports that were created with a zero height.

There is little to to difference between Report Builder and Visual Studio Report Writer… as far as I’ve been able to tell… some minor things are different but nothing worth it (IMO)

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Even though I develop my reports in Report Builder, I regularly use Visual Studio to find all the hidden elements, view code, etc. The properties window has a drop down list of all elements on the page, selecting the one you can never find in Report Builder will quickly highlight its location in the report. Also, viewing code, you can search for a particular setting on an element that you would need to find in Report builder by painfully inspecting each element on the page, if you can find them. eg. I can quickly find what all the KeepTogether settings are throughout the entire report.

I personally would love to develop reports in Visual Studio, but have never been able to successfully connect it to our report server. Also, both versions of Visual Studio I have (2012 & 2017) output a report which is not compatible with our Report Server version.

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So Report Builder, then SSDT if things go horribly wrong :wink:

Thanks everyone.

Did you set your TargetServerVersion in the project properties?

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I can’t remember now if I tried changing the TargetServerVersion. After not being able to connect to our server, I gave trying to integrate Visual Studio into our server. Just use it for viewing and searching the .rdl files.

[quote=“mchernecki, post:5, topic:47721”]
… Also, both versions of Visual Studio I have (2012 & 2017) output a report which is not compatible with our Report Server version. [/quote]

I was at the WI EUG meeting last week and it was discussed not to use the latest SSDT as it’s has some compatibility problems. However, that said, I downloaded Visual Studio 2015 Community and it’s SSDT but haven’t tried to do any SSRS yet.

SQL SERVER 2014 OR HIGHER https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42313

SQL SERVER 2012 OR LOWER https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36843

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