Question

I’m new to reporting services so this question might be insane. I am looking for a way to create an empty ‘template’ report (that is basically a form letter) rather than having to create one for every client in our system. Part of this form letter is a section that has any number of 25 specific fields. The section is arranged as such:

Name:           Jesse James
Date of Birth:  1/1/1800
Address:        123 Blah Blah Street
                Anywhere, USA 12345
Another Field:  Data
Another Field2: More Data

Those (and any of the other fields the client specifies) could be arranged in any order and the label on the left could be whatever the client decides (example: ‘DOB’ instead of ‘Date of Birth’). IDEALLY, I’d like to be able to have a web interface where you can click on the fields you want, specify the order in which they’ll appear, and specify what the custom label is. I figured out a way to specify the labels and order them (and load them ‘dynamically’ in the report) but I wanted to take it one step further if I could and allow dynamic field (right side) selection and ordering. The catch is, I want to do this without using dynamic SQL. I went down the path of having a configuration table that contained an ordinal, custom label text, and the actual column name and attempting to join that table with the table that actually contains the data via information_schema.columns. Maybe querying ALL of the potential fields and having an INNER JOIN do my filtering (if there’s a match from the ‘configuration’ table, etc). That doesn’t work like I thought it would 🙂 I guess I was thinking I could simulate the functionality of a dataset (it having the value and field name baked in to the object). I realize that this isn’t the optimal tool to be attempting such a feat, it’s just what I’m forced to work with.

The configuration table would hold the configuration for many customers/reports and I would be filtering by a customer ID. The config table would look somthing like this:

CustID LabelText ColumnName Ordinal
1 First Name FName 1
1 Last Name LName 2
1 Date of Birth DOBirth 3
2 Client ID ClientID 1
2 Last Name LName 2
2 Address 1 Address1 3
2 Address 2 Address2 4

All that to say:

1. Is there a way to pull off the above mentioned query?
2. Am I being too picky about not using dynamic SQL as the section in question will only be pulling back one row? However, there are hundreds of clients running this report (letter) two or three times a day.

Also, keep in mind I am not trying to dynamically create text boxes on the report. I will either just concatenate the fields into a single string and dump that into a text box or I’ll have multiple reports each with a set number of text boxes expecting a generic field name (“field1”,etc). The more I type, the crazier this sounds…
If there isn’t a way to do this I’ll likely finagle something in custom code; but my OCD side wants to believe there is SQL beyond my current powers that can do this in a slicker way.

Answer 1

Not sure why you need this all returned in one row: it seems like SSRS would want this normalized further: return a row for every row in the configuration table for the current report. If you really need to concatenate then do that in Embedded code in the report, or consider just putting a table in the form letter. The query below makes some assumptions about your configuration table. Does it only hold the cofiguration for the current report, or does it hold the config for many customers/reports at once? Also you didn’t give much info about how you’ll filter to the appropriate record, so I just used a customer ID.

SELECT
   config.ordinal,
   config.LabelText,
   CASE config.ColumnName
      WHEN 'FName' THEN DataRecord.FirstName
      WHEN 'LName' THEN DataRecord.LastName
      WHEN 'ClientID' THEN DataRecord.ClientID
      WHEN 'DOBirth' THEN DataRecord.DOB
      WHEN 'Address' THEN DataRecord.Address
      WHEN 'Field' THEN DataRecord.Field
      WHEN 'Field2' THEN DataRecord.Field2
      ELSE
      NULL
      END AS response
FROM
   ConfigurationTable AS config
LEFT OUTER JOIN
   DataTable AS DataRecord
ON config.CustID = DataRecord.CustomerID 
WHERE DataRecord.CustomerID = @CustID
ORDER BY
   config.Ordinal

There are other ways to do this, in SSRS or in SQL, depends on more details of your requirements.