One of my student came with a popup question: how do we disable the export to PDF feature in reporting services? Well, I should say that export to PDF is awesome. But some company don’t allow their employee to do that, or maybe they want to disable export to XML as well.

There are several option to do that. On the report level, we can utilize the query string to inject the parameter, and disable the parameter and export bar on top. Another elegant method is jump to the configuration file of the Reporting Services installation, and comment ot the PDF rendering extension.

Open the rsreportserver.config xml file with any editor of your choice. This file is located under ReportServer folder of the SSRS installation. Here is the capture:

If you’re not sure where is the file located, go to the IIS console and read the home directory of the ReportServer virtual directory.

Once the file is opened, locate the rendering section and disable the PDF extension. We can also disable or enable another extension that available.

As usual, we need to recycle the application pool or simply do IISRESET to apply the changes. The next step is to open a report under the http://yourservername/reports and make sure that PDF extension is not there anymore: