SSRS the definition of the report is invalid

Question

How can I resolve the below error message that I receive when I try to deploy my report to our our Reporting Server using BIDS?

Message:

Error : The definition of the report '/OrderAnalysis' is invalid.

Report Element:

 <Report xmlns:rd="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQLServer/reporting/reportdesigner" xmlns:cl="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2010/01/componentdefinition" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2010/01/reportdefinition">

Are there any version differences you know of? For example, is it a 2005 RDL being deployed to a 2008 server? — Brian Gideon, May 19 '11 at 14:24
Is the report working on your dev machine? Have you made any changes recently to the report? — NakedBrunch, May 19 '11 at 14:27
I think vis studio is referencing components for building the report that are incorrect... I'm not sure tho whether it's referencing 2008 components when it should be 2010, or 2010 when should be 2008... I've pasted the schema information from my report... — jhowe, May 19 '11 at 15:06
I am using a combo of BIDS and vis studio 2010... I needed 2010 installed because we have TFS 2010 and it's not compatible with BIDS or something... long story... — jhowe, May 19 '11 at 15:08

score 151 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 25 '13 at 14:46

151

I just received this obscure message when trying to deploy a report from BIDS.

After a little hunting I found a more descriptive error by going into the Preview window.

answered Jan 25 '13 at 14:46

Ross

1,511
2
9
4

1

Looking at the Preview error helped me solve my error as well. +1 to you for pointing that out. – Jerry Mar 27 '13 at 19:01
2

Found my problem this way too, as soon as I read your solution I remembered I had done it before! So many peculiarities with SSRS designer! – XN16 Mar 19 '14 at 10:29
Thannk you! This solved a problem I'd been banging my head against off and on for a couple weeks! – cutmancometh Apr 28 '16 at 19:39
This should be the accepted answer. Shocking that the "Preview" is providing the exact error while SSDT just says "Something is wrong m8!"...@jhowe – Arklur Mar 14 '18 at 09:15
I wish there was a way to monetarily feed back the costs that lazy error reporting causes 10s of thousands of programmers yearly to the publishers. It seems to have gotten way worse. At the very least the cryptic error message should have said see preview windows but it really should have had the same information. It is ridiculous and costs millions of dollars a year in wasted time. – billpennock May 11 '21 at 17:37

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '11 at 14:45

12

I found the problem to this... due to a incorrect/failed reference in .rdl to data conns etc. Also found that BIDS wasn't happy about having spaces in some of the project/report filenames... so anyone facing this issue make sure you have no spaces in your naming and check your rdl files, connections, everything for failed/out of date references! Visual Studio seems crap at keeping all of it's references up to date... god forbid you have to rename anything!

answered May 20 '11 at 14:45

jhowe

10,198
19
48
66

2

I was just trying to find the cause of a similar issue myself. I'd be weary of changing the source code, as whatever your impression is, the IDE/Report expects certain things from it's auto-generated code. I found my issue was a "hidden" use of a parameter in a background color field for a text box. – Volvox Aug 28 '12 at 02:49
1

I had the exact same problem: The name of the report had "," in it and it was throwing the error. – dance2die Dec 31 '14 at 20:28

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 11 '13 at 17:46

3

I had simply changed the capitalization of ONE character in one of my report parameters and could no longer deploy. Changing the single character back to uppercase allowed me to redeploy. Remarkable.

answered Sep 11 '13 at 17:46

PTansey

567
4
12

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 20 '13 at 09:50

I just had this same problem during a SSRS development of a Custom Report for MS CRM Dynamics 2011.

The reason because it occurred is because I am using some Hidden Parameters and for some of them I forget to give a default value.

So, because of I have few time to finish the report I forget to put the default value for some Parameters and I risked to lost more time to fix it.

Luckily I found it very fast because the error shows the textbox and the paragraph with the first wrong parameter but it didn't shows the name of the parameter:

"I cannot post the image of the error because this website don't allows me"

In general during SSRS developments it's very important to remember: - To put the report parameters in the correct sequence (the referred ones for first es. parameters inherited from master report or parameters essentials for sub-datasets) - To assign a default value to the Hide and Internal Parameters.

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 25 '17 at 15:01

I got this error on a report I copied from another project and changed the data source. I solved it by opening the properties of my dataset, going to the Parameters section, and literally just reselecting all the parameters in the right column, like I just clicked the dropdown and selected the same column. Then I hit preview, and it worked!

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 13 '12 at 15:25

1

A very cryptic message for what my issue was.

I had changed the names of the parameters, but did not update these names in the dataset.

answered Nov 13 '12 at 15:25

Hoonerbean

367
1
4
12

score 1 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 05 '14 at 18:53

This occurred for me due to changing the names of certain dataset fields within BIDS that were being referenced by parameters. I forgot to go into the parameters and reassign a default value (the default value of the parameter didn't automatically change to the newly renamed dataset field. Instead .

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Nov 18 '13 at 15:29

I just ran into this issue as well. There's an option to "refresh fields", which I found useful. What I didn't find intuitive at first was that one has to enter values used to execute the query in such a fashion as to refresh the fields. Once I figured this out, and refreshed the fields - things worked. The data sets and the shared dataset that's being called have to correlate.

score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Apr 28 '16 at 23:51

The report definition is not valid or supported by this version of Reporting Services. This could be the result of publishing a report definition of a later version of Reporting Services, or that the report definition contains XML that is not well-formed or the XML is not valid based on the Report Definition schema.

I got this error when I used ReportSync to upload some .rdl files to SQL Server Report Services. In my case, the issue was that these .rdl files had some Text Box containing characters like ©, — (Em dash), – (En dash) characters, etc. When uploading .rdl files using ReportSync, I had to encode these characters (©, —, –, etc.) and use Placeholder Properties to set the Markup type to HTML in order to get rid of this error.

I wouldn't get this error If I manually uploaded each of the .rdl files one-by-one using SQL Server Reporting Services. But I have a lot of .rdl files and uploading each one individually would be time-consuming, which is why I use ReportSync to mass upload all .rdl files.

Sorry, if my answer doesn't seem relevant, but I hope this helps anyone else getting this error message when dealing with SSRS .rdl files.

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Oct 03 '16 at 17:09

0

I was getting this error and tried most of the suggestions here. Finally I did a "Clean" on the report project and tried again. It finally worked!!

answered Oct 03 '16 at 17:09

Justin Ipson

481
9
6

SSRS the definition of the report is invalid

10 Answers10

Linked