In a previous blog written back in June, I showed you how to use the interactive sort option on a table header text box using values returned from a data set. I also wrote this back in June, but it got lost in my “blogpile”. J At any rate, in this blog, I am going to expand that knowledge to contain dynamic sorting based on an expression. Please read “Interactive Sort Order using Reporting Services 2008” if you’d like to get see how you can sort based from values in the data set.

For this example, I will follow the steps 1-3 mentioned in my previous blog.

Step 1: RIGHT CLICK on the column heading you want to add interactive sorting for and choose the “Text Box Properties…” selection.

Step 2: Select the “Interactive Sorting” tab as shown in Figure 1.

Step 3: Select the option to “Enable interactive sorting on this text box”

Step 4: Choose the “fx” button to create an expression to sort by

For example, let’s say that you supply the user to select a parameter called SortBy that would be used to sort the results. Assuming that there is a second field in our results called Article, the expression that you might enter would look similar to the below:

=IIF(Parameters!SortBy.Value="Description",Fields!Description.Value,Fields!Article.Value)

Figure 1: Text Box Properties Dialog

And that is all there too setting up interactive sorting based off of an expression based value. I hope that you have enjoyed this post. If you did, please take just a moment to rate it below! Also, if you don’t already, please be sure to follow me on twitter at @briankmcdonald. Also note that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of my blogs.

Brian K. McDonald, MCDBA, MCSD
Business Intelligence Consultant – Pragmatic Works

Email: bmcdonald@pragmaticworks.com | Blogs: SQLBIGeek | SQLServerCentral | BIDN

Twitter: @briankmcdonald | LinkedIn: http://tinyurl.com/BrianKMcDonald