Migrate SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports
A few weeks ago I released a blog post about migrating SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports. At that point in time, I wasn’t aware of any way to migrate multiple SSRS Reports in one go.
Meanwhile, I have done some research and experimented a bit. In this blog post, I will be going through 2 different ways to migrate multiple SSRS Reports at once to Power BI.
Quick Overview
- Reporting Portal
- —Migration
- —Validation
- Microsoft RLD Migration Tool
- —App Registration
- —Migrate to a Power BI Pro Workspace
Reporting Portal
Migration
The easiest way to migrate SSRS Reports to Power BI probably will be via the Reporting portal.
In my case, I have a local installation of version V15.0.1102.1047 of SQL Server Reporting Services. When I navigate to my Reporting Services portal, I can see a Publish button at the right top corner of the portal.
I have another machine that is running V15.0.1102.911 of SQL Server Reporting Services which does not has the Publish option available. In case you don’t have the option available there are 2 different things you can do:
- Upgrade your SQL Server Reporting Services instance
- Using the other way to migrate SSRS Reports to Power BI which I describe below. (you can use this link to get to that section)
In case you have the Publish option available in the SSRS Reporting portal, you can continue here.
When we click the Publish button, we get 2 different options:
From this point, I will go through the steps required to migrate the reports. We will be migrating selected reports to Power BI. If you just want to Publish all reports to Power BI you can choose “Publish all reports” and start following the guide from the point where we are singing-in into Power BI.
Since we are migrating selected reports, we will be executing the following steps:
First, we click the Publish button in the right top corner of the Reporting Portal and choose “Select reports to publish”
As a second step, we select the reports we want to migrate, in my case this is my Sales By Category and Sales By SubCategory Report and we click the Publish to Power BI button.
To continue the migration process, we are signing in to Power BI.
As soon as we have signed in, we can select the Power BI Workspace we want to migrate to. I’m migrating the reports to my Paginated Reports Workspace.
Now click the Publish button to confirm. As soon as we have confirmed the Power BI Workspace, the migration process kicks off. This might take a couple of minutes.
Validation
As soon as the process finishes, we receive the following message:
We now can navigate to the Power BI Workspace, in my case Paginated Reports, and check our migrated reports.
RDL Migration Tool
If you don’t have the first option available (the Publish button in the Reporting Portal), Microsoft still offers a way to migrate SSRS Reports to Power BI Paginated Reports using an open-source extension.
You can find the extension here: https://github.com/microsoft/RdlMigration
The readme file, which is included in the GitHub repository contains includes a step-by-step guide to use this tool. Because of that, I will not go through every single step myself but I would like to point out a couple of things.
App Registration
First, if you go through the step-by-step guide, you will get to a certain point where you will try to obtain an Application Client ID. You will be trying to login into the following window:
If this doesn’t seem to be working, click the Get Started button as shown below.
To continue, you need to navigate to the following section on the web page:
As soon as you choose this option, you will be able to set up your Power BI Embedding environment. Choose the “Embed for your customers” option.
From this point onwards, you can follow the manual in the GitHub repository again.
Migrate to a Power BI Pro Workspace
At this moment, the RDL Migration tool only supports migrating to a Power BI Premium Workspace.
Although, with a very small code adjustment you can still use the RDL Migration tool to migrate to your Power BI Pro Workspace. I have created a Pull Request to the RDL Migration tool project to support this as well.
Until the Pull Request is approved and merged, you will need to download the source code and navigate to the PowerBIClientWrapper.cs file. Open this file and remove the following lines of code:
As soon as you have removed this code, You need to Build your local solution and execute the Migration from your local folder where the Build process has created the RdlMigration.exe file. Most of the time this will be in a folder like this:
Now you are ready to migrate your .rdl files to a Power BI Pro Workspace. When I executed the RdlMigration.exe file I got the following output:
If we quickly validate in the RdlMigratrion Power BI Workspace, we can find the following result:
Great guide, thank you.
Were you able to test larger scale migrations using the RDL migration tool? We have hundreds of reports to migrate and only getting about a 50% success rate when migrating. And there seems to be no log with more detail in what the issue is.
We have SSRS 2016 so the publish button is not available to us. Our auditing is very strict so upgrading the production server would require a lot of paperwork/sign off. I am wondering about setting up a test 2019 SSRS server, restoring the database of reports there, and then trying the publish tool. Did you test migrating lots of reports with high success rate using that feature?
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out, I have executed a migration of less than 100 reports. due to my setup, I was required to migrate folder by folder since I used a separate deployed reports folder for every Report Server Project I have.
In the end, the only errors I got were reports that were already deployed (since it also tries to deploy the linked reports).
When you execute the migration using the Rdl Migration tool, a ConversionLog file will be created. Maybe this log file can help to see why some reports failed migration.
Kind regards