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Using Business Intelligence Development Studio, I am creating a report for SSRS that requires the user to add a few notes before being printed. The notes do not need to be sent back to the SQL Server that the report is being generated from, they just need to be included when the report is printed or exported. I have some other solutions including:

  • Exporting to Word for edit, then the user can manually publish to pdf & send
  • Including parameters for the note fields which involves pulling the report, then adding in the notes and lastly re-pulling the report again to include the data

But I really don't want to add the extra steps to the user's process unless necessary. Has anyone tried this before? I've been tinkering and searching and have had no luck.

Thanks in advance.

rene
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Luke Wyatt
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    Have you tried adding a parameter, and placing that on the report? Should be pretty straight forward. – Jamie F Oct 24 '12 at 20:43
  • I mentioned that as a potential solution, but the user is pulling the report first to analyze the data. So they would pull it once, then add the notes, and then pull the report again with the parameters added. Just seems sloppy to me, -especially if the SP being called requires a lot of processing. – Luke Wyatt Oct 24 '12 at 20:53
  • @JamieF I think you should put that as an answer. There is no other convenient way to do this in SSRS-2008, AFAIK. – Jeroen Oct 24 '12 at 22:00
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    @LukeWyatt: Wouldn't they need to run the report once anyway in order to be able to formulate their context specific notes? In this case the parameter option works. – Adrian Torrie Oct 26 '12 at 06:18

2 Answers2

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Input to an SSRS report comes from data sources and the parameters. Some server settings are applied, but all the per-report stuff is from either of those two places.

Based on the OP comment, I would add a text parameter that allows blank values. You can set a default value of ="" so that the report will run on first access. Then any text the users adds can be inserted into the report simply by referring to the parameter's value.(=Parameters!MyParam1.Value)

Jamie F
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user is pulling the report first to analyze the data. So they would pull it once, then add the notes, and then pull the report again with the parameters added.

usboxprinting
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  • Your solution is a bit short. You might consider explaining it a bit further with more details or examples. – Samoth Aug 26 '13 at 11:46
  • This question was aimed towards avoiding the extra data pull (and help lower the load on the SQL server). Ultimately, this is the only option though... – Luke Wyatt Aug 26 '13 at 15:26