I see this question on the forums all the time and thought it was worth a repost here.
Just this week, at least two people on the MSDN
forum for Reporting Services have asked how to add radio buttons or check boxes
to a report.
Can this be done?
No, …I mean Yes, …well, sort of.
Many new report designers who have an application development background tend to treat
Reporting Services as an app development tool at it's not. Although you can
embed code into a report, you cannot add controls in the same way that you would in
a web form or windows form project. Report "controls" are known as "report items"
and are generally for displaying data, not gathering input. The report parameters
don't give you explicit control over the way users are prompted for input values and
typically display values in a drop-down list. If you really need to create a
custom interface to prompt for parameter values, you can create a custom web form
and then use the ReportViewer control or generate a URL string to launch the report,
but this is an exception to the standard reporting experience. You can do a
lot of creative things with SSRS but the design approach is much different that application
development. For newcomers I recommend that you pick up a good book on Reporting
Services and learn the how the product was designed to function, rather than spending
a lot of extra effort customizing it.
When I’m asked if it’s possible to do something in Reporting Services, I try to frame
the need I one of three categories:
- A product feature, something that SSRS was designed to do easily, using the standard
design interface and properties.
- An advanced feature that the product does well but requires advanced knowledge, scripting
or a little programming.
- A very creative extension of product features and custom programming, perhaps stretching
the limits of the product design.
Here’s a way to add checkboxes to a report that can be used for interactive selection.
The same technique could be used to add radio buttons. These techniques fit
into category 3 in the above list.
checkboxes to select/deselect items & choose parameters
Weblog by Paul Turley and SQL Server BI Blog.
