Fixing broken links in CRM 2011 standard reports

I have recently battled my way through the inner workings of CRM 2011 Reporting facilities. We got ourselves into trouble when we rolled up a dedicated Reporting Services Server and migrated all our reports – including the one’s in CRM – to this new server. Along the way the reports were placed in another folder on the new server and hence we had broken links within the standard reports.

The strategy to start with was to see if we somehow could run a repair on the SSRS Connector for CRM which according to this post would re-publish the reports – we would hopefully nail a few other issues along the way which is outside the scope of this blogpost. No luck there – we never actually succeeded in running a successful repair due to security issues, missing files in installation directory and other fun stuff. After a full day of teeth-grinding, frowning and the occasional swearing and fist-throwing we changed strategy and decided to hack the standard report itself to fix the broken links – we figured that a single broken report was more of a joy to handle than a fullblown crash on the entire reporting engine.

It turned out that editing the standard report was pretty straight forward – the report containing the broken links (the “Campaign Performance Detail Report”) is a giant you-know-what of XML – go search for <Action> and you’ll find something like this:

Paddling through the XML you’ll eventually find an action which is a DrillThrough:

Change the value of ReportName to the correct path on your Reporting Server, save and overwrite the existing report in your CRM installation – and you’re done.

All there you have to do now is to put your edited copy of the standard report into sourcecontrol because it is almost destined to happen that some future rollup of CRM will alter or try to modify existing reports on your CRM installation.