November 18, 2014 at 1:07 am
OK a bit of a strange title but I kind of want to have a discussion about it.
SO here comes what happened
Last week my boss demanded I drop everything I was working on and make some changes to an existing report (a report I never seen cause it's not from our department)
The report shows for the past month,each day the orders that have arrived,it also shows how many workdays an order took to arrive.
Besides a begin and end date,which are on default current date minus a month and current date minus a day,there are 8 other parameters, ranging from ordernumber to country where the order arrived. All these parameters start with a default value of "_ALL" which basically means they can be ignored in the outcome.
My boss wanted to make it cascading so that when you select 1 value for 1 of the parameters you can only choose for valid options in the others.
So for instance choose the UK as country you should only be able to choose out of orders in the UK.
So I looked into the queries that filled in the parameters and saw that their actually all looking towards the same table,so I made a stored procedure to get the cascades dynamically.
I implemented this into the report,knowing full well that upwards cascading is not possible.
I tested the report,send both the files as a mail explaining it to him.
Yesterday he comes to me,angry that the cascade does not work,I explain him that upwards cascading is not possible. He insist I did not do my work properly,so compromise I spend an hour after work looking into it further.
Off course after that hour I was able to proof to him it was not possible like he wanted.
Now the discussion I wanted to start is 'Why is it not possible',is their any valid reason you would not be able to do an upwards cascade.
November 18, 2014 at 10:41 am
In order to "upwards" cascade parameters you'd have to load all the values for every parameter into the report to start and then do the filtering on the reporting server or on the client. I can see how that would be difficult to implement on web site. "ALL" would have to be available for every parameter all the time so you could get back to re-filter. Sounds like a lot of work for limited gain because you can normally find the order that the user is wants to filter and setup the parameters that way.
An option is to create a custom web page with the parameters for this report and then use URL access to render the report. Then you are loading the parameters into a custom web page that you control vs the report manager interface and you can make the parameters work however you want. I wouldn't do it, but it is possible.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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