SSRS 2016 Report Viewer Control

Question

We are looking at installing SSRS 2016. We currently use ReportViewer Control 11 (2012). Do we need to upgrade to ReportViewer Control 12 (2015) in order for us to view reports?

I'm assuming there isn't any 2016 version yet.

Just want to make sure all is possible if we install 2016 version of SSRS.

Answer 1

SSRS 2016 Report Designer uses a new 2016 schema definition for the rdls that is NOT supported by the v12 control:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2016/01/reportdefinition

So if you Upgrade your SSRS to 2016, and you have upgraded your designer tools and you are using the report viewer control in your own web app (which you must be or you wouldn't have asked right) Then you will have to use the v13 report viewer.

If your RDLs are not edited with the latest designer tools, the v12 report viewer should still be able to render them, though I have not tested this scenario against the latest CTP

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The v12 report viewer is backwards compatible with 2005, 2008, 2010 and of course the 2012 schema definitions (which is used by the 2014/2015 report designers).

So if your team has upgraded to VS 2015 Update 3, with the latest SQL Server Data Tools, then you will start to see 2016 report definitions popping up as they get edited.

previous versions of SQL Data Tools would only upgrade the RDL definition when you used one of the new features, this new version seems to upgrade them regardless

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There is no 'official' client runtime download for the v13 report viewer yet, you will have to extract the necessary dlls from the GAC from the server with SSRS 2016 running on it, or from a development machine with the latest Data Tools installed. If you run into issues have a look at the ReportViewer.aspx file in the SSRS 2016 Web App Folder for the latest syntax changes.