Question

I am developing a Reporting Services solution for a DOD website. Frequently I’ll have a report and want to have as a parameter the Service (in addition to other similar mundane, but repetitive parameters like Fiscal Year, Data Effective Date, etc). Basically everything I’ve seen of SSRS 2005 says it can’t be done… but I personally refuse to believe that MS would be so stupid/naive/short-sited to leave something like sharing datasets out of reporting entirely.

Is there a clunky (or not so clunky way) to share datasets and still keep the reporting server happy? Will SSRS2008 do this?

EDIT:

I guess I worded that unclearly. I have a stack of reports. Since I’m in a DoD environment, one common parameter for these reports is Service (army, navy, etc. for those non US users). Since ‘Business rules’ cause me to not be able to use stored procedures; is there a way I can make 1 dataset and link to it from the various reports? Will Reporting 2008 support something like this? I’m getting sick of re-typing the same query in a bunch of reports.

Answer 1

I am not clear if you need to share a dataset, since you have some SQL results that you need to use twice, and don’t want to re-compute the same data twice, or you want to do something regarding parameters. So with this ‘I didn’t really understand the question’ preface…

1. You cannot share a dataset. Meaning, you can’t, lets say, have a dataset returning table A, and in dataset B try to join with A.
2. If this is really what you want to do, you could use temporary tables to store A and then in dataset B use the temporary table. There are best practices around that, but since I am not sure this is what you need, I won’t spend time talking about that right now.