Today I installed the BI Indexing Connector for the first time (neat stuff!) and pretty quickly saw a change in the way the PowerPivot gallery renders Reporting Services reports.

When installing the backend component of the connector, you are instructed to append NoGetRedirect=”True” to a partcular element in the ServerFiles_ReportServer.xml file (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff678217.aspx). Doing so allows the connector to crawl Reporting Services reports.

Unfortunately, this change also modifies how the PowerPivot Gallery Silverlight application renders SSRS reports. The default behavior is “click on an SSRS report and I’ll render it for you in the browser”.  However, once you make the change above, when you click on an SSRS report in the PowerPivot Theater, Carousel, or Gallery…whoops!

Rather than rendering the report as one would expect, the actual RDL file for the report  is returned to the browser and you get the standard “Save as File” dialog!

I’ll update this post when I find out more about the behavior, but if you bump into this issue, you’ve done nothing wrong

Update 1:

Looks like this is only occurs if you install everything on one machine. In the real world, I suspect that very few people running FAST will do what I did in terms of building out a machine which acts as a front-end and back-end. However, if you do, be prepared.