This article discusses the differences in handling Config file changes between SSRS 2017 and SSRS 2019.
While implementing a Custom Deployment in SSRS using a custom Data Extension and modifying the SSRS config files to add the extension, prior to SSRS 2019, Reporting Services would recognize changes made to its config files and a restart of the Reporting Services was not required.
When custom deployments were done for SSRS 2017 and the earlier versions and SSRS config files were modified to include the custom extensions, Reporting Services would identify the modifications done to its config files and initiate an automatic restart of Reporting Services for the changes to take effect. When custom deployments are used with SSRS 2019, Reporting Service does not initiate recycling when the SSRS config files are modified.
There have been internal code level changes between SSRS 2017 and SSRS 2019 and this change with SSRS 2019 is currently being looked upon internally. Therefore, for the custom deployment changes made to the config files to take effect in SSRS 2019 we would need to manually restart Reporting Services until the changes at the code level are done.
Author: Shreya Nagar – Support Engineer, SQL Server BI team, Microsoft
Reviewer: Kane Conway – Escalation Engineer, SQL Server BI team, Microsoft @kaneco
