Alter appearance of data after report is generated

Question

I have a detail report with interactive sorting on the headers. After the report is refreshed, the user would like to highlight some rows of data that appear throughout the report in order to see if patterns are detectable.

Say, a vendor name that appears on multiple customer rows might indicate that they all shopped at the same vendor before their credit card was compromised. Highlighting that vendor name might make it easier to spot whether this is a problem vendor. They won't know what they want to highlight until they start perusing the data, so a run-time parameter won't work.

In the past I used BusinessObjects which had a control that could be used to trigger alerts (formatting changes).

Is there a way to hack such a thing in SSRS?

Answer 1

Is there a way to hack such a thing in SSRS? No.

But, if the report user wants to export the report to Excel, then they can do whatever they would like to that spreadsheet afterward. They just need to know that any changes will not be written back to a data store any where as a result of that.

SSRS is purely for reporting data, not altering it, or annotating it. Changing the report output in Report Manager is not possible, either.

If you need to be able to highlight data in a report at run time, you can do that via a combination of properties and expressions in the RDL. Your business users would need to tell you what the rules for that are, then you can make the changes in what ever dev tool you are using to create reports.

I hope this clarifies some things for you.

Answer 2

Add a parameter that is populated with Vendor names.

Then in your rows, right click and go to TextBox Properties. Then click the Fill tab on the left and next to Fill Color press the fx button to add code:

=IIF(Parameters!VendorName.Label = Fields!VendorName.Value, "OrangeRed", "White")

This will highlight the cell OrangeRed if the VendorName in this row matches the one selected in the parameter.