Remove a Rendering Format From The Report Manager

The ability to export reports from the report manager is an awesome feature, but some organizations have specific governance and/or oversight that prohibit some of the available formats.  I have worked with several clients who were mandated to remove all exportable extensions that allowed the users to modify the rendered report.  The ability to “hide” specific rendering extensions is relatively easy, but is instance wide and not available on a report by report basis.
There are several configuration files specific to SSRS, but the one responsible for providing rendering options in the report manager is called “rsreportserver.config”. The path where this file resides is specific to the version of SSRS that is installed, but the general location is “drive:\ Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\”. In this example I am running SSRS 2008 so the config file is in the “MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services\ReportServer” folder.
As this is a configuration file it is xml and can be edited in any text or xml editor. For SSRS 08 line 176 to line 188 contains the “Render” element for the report manager.

There is a “Visible” property for the attribute of each of the available rendering extensions which is set to true by default.  Adding Visible=”false” to the end of the extension attribute and saving the configuration file will remove the export extension from the report manager.  In the below example I modified the “CSV” extension setting the visible property to false:

Before

After

The change takes affect immediately and does not require a restart of the reporting services service, but if a user is already in the report manager the option will still be visible until the page is refreshed.  This does not remove the ability to export to the extension, but only removes the extension within the report manager’s “Export” drop down.