SSRS report - different versions of ReportViewer

Question

I am currently running version 15, which it is I think the latest. How can I also try previous versions?

Thanks

Answer 1

ReportViewer is a UI component of either your desktop or web app. In general you shouldn't need to worry about "previous versions" as your reports are being rendered by your app and you control the RV version. Additionally, at the end of the day, if you're using SSRS then RV is just the UI used to wrap the report that is generated on the server so outside the parameter UI the version of RV shouldn't matter for report rendering.

If you want to try older versions of RV then you need to setup a test app (web or desktop) and reference the older RV versions. RV comes from Nuget so in your app you can install an older version of the RV package to get the older versions as defined here and here. Note that they only go back to v14 but that is 6 years ago and is probably far enough back. Prior to that they were part of the framework (which is no longer supported I believe) and before that they were standalone binaries (but that version of the framework isn't even available I believe).

To install earlier versions of a package you'll need to use Package Manager in Visual Studio to downgrade from the latest version to an older version.

Answer 2

I am not using SSRS server, reports are running in Local Mode. My problem is that exporting reports to Excel is taking too long. I thought, maybe prev. versions of RV were more efficient in this regard.