Custom Parameter Page with Report Manager

Dear Everyone,

Suffice it to say, almost everyone who seriously uses (relies) reporting services hates the postbacks that the report parameter section does. It literally runs all queries that populates the report parameters. This will just not do.

We're thinking of creating a custom web page to either augment or replace the parameter section of the report. Our problem is that we dont know how to connect it to report manager in such a away that it will actually interact with the current instance of the report. Has anyone tried this at all? Does anyone have any idea on how to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Joseph

The postbacks should only occur when a parameter has parameters that depend on it. If you are seeing post backs in other cases, this could be a bug. Keep in mind that expression based parameters are assumed to have dependencies on all parameters that are defined before them. I'm not sure how you would write your own parameters that would not require a post back (unless you know all combinations of parameter values and never expect the back-end data to change).

Report Manager is not extensiblie so there is no way replace this section of Report Manager.

|||

Thanks for the reply. We understand that postbacks only occur on parameters with dependencies. But the thing that really is a head ache is when a post back occurs, all queries of all the parameters gets fired again in the server. Our reports have an average of 8 parameters. This means that when a post back occurs, all queries related to the 8 parameters (data set used in population) gets executed again making another round trip to the server. We're still hoping that this is a bug because for us, this is a major concern over the reporting services product and absolutely does not add any business value to the product.

|||

Yes, we do re-execute all queries. The reason is we need to verify that the values is still valid.

We do realize that this is a pain point and I have opened a bug to track this issue. That is not a guarantee that it will change, but we will certainly look into alternative solutions. Thanks for bringing this issue to us.

Have you looked into using Report Execution Snapshots? For these we will store all the parameter queries so they will not be re-executed. Of course you data will not be live either so that may not be an option for you.

|||

Thank you for a reply. It's a relief that at least someone is taking a look into it.

You mentioned the use of report execution snapshots. Are parameters with dependencies (cascading parameters) also cached when their used on report execution snapshots?

|||Yes, cascading parameters are all stored in the snapshot. You should not see any paramter queries run if the report is running from a snapshot execution. The problem is your limited to only change the parameters that are not in a query so I don't think it will solve your issue.