Report footer is not exported to Excel

OK, so I've actually figured out how to accomplish this seemigly impossible task.

Before I begin, let me just say that if you are working with SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 (SSRS 08) and have (i.e. you have no choice) to use something like Basic auth, you'll only find a world of hurt with the WCF based Service Stubs & IIS. I'm going to blog about the configuration later.

The short answer is as follows:

• Connect (e.g. new ReportingService2005() or ReportingService2005SoapClient())

Note: It's easier to use the old (pre-WCF) ASMX service, but not impossible to use the new CF version. The Authentication takes some configuring. There are also some slight syntactic changes between versions.

• Find the report history you are looking for, e.g. ReportHistorySnapshot[] history = reportServer.ListReportHistory(@"/Reports/MyHandyReport");
• Get the HistoryID from whichever snapshot you want (returned from the ListHistoryReport)

• Now, use a ReportViewer to render the historic report, much like you would any other report, e.g.:

  ReportViewer rv = new ReportViewer();
  rv.ProcessingMode = ProcessingMode.Remote;
  rv.ServerReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri(@"http://localhost/reportserver");
  rv.ServerReport.ReportPath = @"/Reports/MyHandyReport";
  rv.ServerReport.HistoryId = historyId;
  //...snip
  byte[] bytes = rv.ServerReport.Render("Excel", null, out mimeType, out encoding, out extension, out streamids, out warnings);

Note: you can also use the second WCF Web Service (ReportExecution2005.asmx?wsdl) as well for Report Execution

I finally managed to get this working by going to the Reporting Services Configuration Manager > Encryption Keys > Delete Encrypted Content > Delete.

Not sure why this worked, but it did.

Just for completeness I have noticed that I still the get the following error in the Application Log, which luckily doesn't seem to cause any obvious problems for me, but remains nonetheless.

Failed to unload app domain DefaultDomain. The following exception occurred: Error while unloading appdomain. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131015).

If I find anything else I'll post back.