Question

I’ve been looking for this answer for a couple days now and I’ve been getting little bits of information that make it seem that you can have ReportViewer Control automatically prompt for the report’s parameters. Just everything that I’ve tried and found doesn’t seem to work. I’ve gotten the Parameter Prompts to work on a Windows Form but I just cannot get it to work in ASP.NET

I guess I’m simply asking can you get Report-viewer’s Parameter Prompts to work in ASP.NET? if so, How?

I know you can do it manually, it’s just, I feel if you can make ReportViewer Prompt automatically why program it yourself?

Edit: this is for local processing btw.

Answer 1

Prompting for parameters is not supported in local processing mode.

In article Report Parameters Dialog Box (Visual Studio Report Designer), which is invoked by clicking the Help button on that dialog, it says in the introductory text that:

The parameters properties that you specify in the Report Parameters
dialog box become part of the report definition. Some properties are
intended for programmatic use only. In contrast with reports that are
processed on a remote report server, a locally processed report does
not have a parameter input area used for selecting or typing parameter
values.

A little testing shows me that the default values specified for the parameters will be used, unless you modify them programmatically. I could not find an explanation on this design decision. If you want to use local processing, and prompt for user input, I would recommend to follow this solution:

I you embed the reports in a ReportViewer Control, you can put it on a page or form and add custom input controls to that page or form to gather report parameters. In the code-behind files, you will then pass the parameter values using code like this:

List<ReportParameter> parameterList = new List<ReportParameter>();
List<string> selectedProductTypes = listboxProductTypes.GetSelectedValues();
ReportParameter productTypes = new ReportParameter("ProductTypes", selectedProductTypes.ToArray(), false);
ReportParameter username = new ReportParameter("Username", "<current user>", false);
parameterList.Add(productTypes);
parameterList.Add(username);
reportViewer.LocalReport.SetParameters(parameterList);

In this example, you can see how to pass a multi-valued parameter, the values of which are taken from a multi-select ListBox.