Ran into a new-to-me quirk this week while putting together a couple of reports. I have a summary report (essentially a group by) that is linked to a detail report (that shows the details!) based on a couple of passed parameters. Works fine. I wanted to add a couple of optional filters to the detail report because sometimes it’s more data than I can easily consume and filtering is arguably quicker than exporting to Excel to do the same thing. My filters also worked fine in the IDE, but when I deployed and did the drill through, the parameters are hidden. If I go to the detail report directly I can enter them and they work fine.

I found a post on MSDN that says it is by design, the assumption being that we don’t want the user to be able to change the parameters if they got there via drill through. Maybe that is true most of the time. Or all of the time except today, for me. The only way I can find to override this behavior is to change the link to a URL instead of a report, doable but not as elegant and more work than I care about doing right now. It feels like a decent assumption without follow through – just give me that one property on the calling report that would let show or hide the parameter window on the down hill report and I’d be happy. Assuming that it should always be that way…well, I’ve made that mistake myself a time or two.

Let me know if there is a way to do it other than URL.