Question

I have a report I am developing in BIDS for SSRS 2008 R2 that uses a stored procedure as its data source. I have set up parameters in the report and the report is passing them on to the stored procedure and everything works fine. However, I now need to convert the report so it gets its parameters passed to it from a ReportViewer control in a C# ASP.Net application instead of allowing them to be entered in the SSRS interface. I think I am fine on the C# side (using ServerReport.SetParameters), but I don’t know what to do in BIDS to route those passed-in parameter values to the stored procedure. Can anyone provide an example?

I also need to prevent the report from displaying the UI for entering the parameters. Should I set the parameters to Hidden or Internal?

Answer 1

I would set the report parameters as Internal but read up on this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337234.aspx for the section Hidden and Internal Parameters and decided for yourself what is appropriate to the problem.

Assuming you have a stored proc like

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.RepeatAfterMe
(
    @inputText varchar(50)
,   @repeatFactor int = 10
)
AS
BEGIN
    SET NOCOUNT ON
    DECLARE @count int
    DECLARE @hack TABLE (inputText varchar(50))

    SET @count = 0
    WHILE @count < @repeatFactor
    BEGIN
        INSERT INTO @hack SELECT @inputText
        SET @count = @count + 1
    END
    SELECT H.* FROM @hack H
END
GO

Define 2 report parameters in SSRS (InputText as string, RepeatFactor as integer). Then, in your SSRS, your dataset would be defined like

EXECUTE dbo.RepeatAfterMe @inputText,
@repeatFactor

And then on the Parameters tab of the dataset, it would look like

@inputText =Parameters!InputText.Value 
@repeatFactor =Parameters!RepeatFactor.Value

For completeness of solution, this is an approximation of the code I use to pass parameters in to a report control with an ID of rvReportViewer

Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportParameter[] reportParameters = null;
reportParameters = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportParameter[2];
reportParameters[0] = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportParameter("inputText", txtInput);
reportParameters[1] = new Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportParameter("repeatFactor", 10);
try
{
    rvReportViewer.ServerReport.SetParameters(reportParameters);
}
catch(Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportServerException ex)
{
    Response.Redirect("~/Error.aspx");
}