What user data or customizations will I lose if I deactivate and reactivate a site collection feature

Question

I am having problems with my embedded SSRS reports (print button missing) and it claims that my Report Viewer web part is not configured correctly, or something along those lines. I was thinking of deactivating and then reactivating the Report Server Integration Feature in Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site Collection features but it gives me this warning message when I select that option "You are about to deactivate the Report Server Integration Feature feature. If you deactivate this feature, any user data or customizations associated with this feature might be lost. In addition, any active features that depend on this feature might fail to function."

I have deactivated and reactivated other features before as part of upgrades and deployments without ill effects and I was wondering if this is a generic message and might not apply to this feature or if I should be worried about having to reconfigure/recustomize a bunch of stuff if I deactivate and then reactivate that feature to try to resolve my problem.

Answer 1

Generally speaking you need to check dependencies of other Features to this Feature, but also to ensure that existing functionality do not depend on any artifacts this feature could deploy (Web parts, physical files, controls, etc.).

• To check if other features depend on this one you could do this by looking up the GUID of the feature in a physical folder and everywhere it appears check the FeatureDependencies element.
• To identify what this feature does you would look into the Feature.xml and Elements.xml to see what artifacts it deploys, e.g. stuff deployed via Modules must be removed manually, any custom controls, web-parts, which might depend on the actual assembly deployed by the feature will also crash.

Also, to my knowledge the SSRS site collection feature is part of the actual Enterprise features which are usually pushed-down from Central Admin when using the "Activate/Deactivate Enterprise Features on existing sites" - any farm admin would be able to re-activate it again.

Answer 2

its a generic massage, but if you keep it disable then SSRS reports will not work.