SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services Custom Branding Example

By:Rajendra Gupta || Related Tips: > Reporting Services Configuration

Problem

Branding is an essential aspect of an organization. It differentiates the company from its competitors and reflects an organization's image. Some of the important aspects of branding are the organization's logo and design templates (color scheme). SQL Server 2016 provides several enhancements to Reporting Services and the Reporting Services web portal is a new, updated, modern portal, which incorporates KPIs, Mobile Reports, Paginated Reports, Excel, and Power BI Desktop files. The Reporting Services web portal now supports branding for organizations and in this tip we will cover what can be done with branding.

Solution

Before we move on, let's look at the Reporting Services web service portal in SQL Server 2014. We do not have any functionality available in this version to customize the web portal with a custom logo, colors, or themes.

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In SQL Server 2016, the Reporting Services web portal looks like below. One of the significant enhancements to SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services is that it now supports branding of the web portal with a logo and custom colors.

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SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services Branding Overview

To brand the Reporting Services web portal, we need to create a brand package. A brand package consists of the following files:

metadata.xml logo.png colors.json
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We can download a sample brand package from this link .

Metadata.xml

The metadata.xml file is used to set the name of the brand package that we want to see in the Reporting Services web portal. It is also references an entry for the colors.json and logo.png files.

Below is the code for the Metadata.xml.

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To change the name of your brand package, we need to modify the name attribute of the SystemResourcePackage element. We can see here that this file has a reference to colors.json and logo.png files in contents. If we want to use a logo, the logo file format should be .png. The logo file dimensions will be scaled once uploaded to the server.

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It's optional to use a logo in the branding package, so if we do not want to use a logo the contents section is as below.

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Colors.json

As per MSDN, when the brand package is uploaded, the server extracts the appropriate name/value pairs from the colors.json file and merges them with the master LESS stylesheet, brand.less. This LESS file is then processed and the resulting CSS file is served to the client. All colors in the stylesheet follow the six-character hexadecimal representation of a color. We can use this link to check the hex color codes.

The colors.json file looks like below:

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The colors.json file has two main categories for Reporting Service web portal:

Interface Theme Interface Section for colors.json

The interface section includes items that are particular to the Reporting Services web portal. The interface section further breaks down to the following items under the interface section.

Primary Secondary Neutral Primary Neutral Secondary Neutral Tertiary Danger/Warning/Success KPIs

The primary section represents button and hover colors. Below is the code in colors.json for the primary section:

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In the below screenshot of the Reporting Services web portal, we can see the mapping of color codes with its look.

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The secondary section provides colors for title bar, search bar, left-hand menu and text color for those items. Below is the code in colors.json for the secondary section:

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The neutral primary section is for the home and report area backgrounds. The neutral secondary section is for text boxes, folder backgrounds and setting menu. The neutral tertiary section provides site background settings. Below is the code in colors.json for these items:

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There is also a color section for danger, warning and success messages.

The KPI section controls the colors for a good (1), neutral (0), neutral (-1) and none.

Below is the code in colors.json for messages and KPIs:

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Theme Section for colors.json

This group contains the themes for the SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher.

We can see the color palette contains the below items:

Background color Data points (twelve colors lines at the bottom) with options for good (green), bad (red), and neutral (yellow). Accent, maps, colors, panel backgrounds

In the SQL Server Mobile Report Publisher, we can see the themes as below:

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Customize Branding with Logo

To customize branding for the SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services web portal, we have to modify the metadata.xml and colors.json files. For this demo purpose, I included the mssqlTips logo for our Reporting Services web portal. We will be looking at each file to do the customization.

You can find the customized branding package in the attachment section.

Metadata.xml

Below is the metadata.xml for my branding package. I have specified the name in metadata.xml as MSSQLTips.

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Colors.Json

I have modified the hex code of colors in the colors.json files for different items.

{
"name":"MSSQLTIPS",
"version":"1.0",
"interface":{
"primary":"#e0893c",
"primaryAlt":"#6a8c99",
"primaryAlt2":"#621013",
"primaryAlt3":"#e40000",
"primaryAlt4":"#e14e50",
"primaryContrast":"#fff",
"secondary":"#042200",
"secondaryAlt":"#0f4400",
"secondaryAlt2":"#155500",
"secondaryAlt3":"#217700",
"secondaryContrast":"#f49539",
"neutralPrimary":"#d8edff",
"neu