Dynamic Reports

[DerPflug]

I am brand new to SSRS so this might be universally known as a bad question I did an extensive project with Access reports about a year ago so I have an idea of the crazy tree I'm barking up; I just want to make sure I don't want to waste any time going down a path that has nothing good at the end of it.

I need to simplify report creation for a report that will have a couple of static text sections and a section that could be any number of fields from a database. Although those fields don't vary too incredibly much from report to report, they DO vary. Also, the order in which they appear may vary, as well as the label that accompanies each field.

That being said I want to create a Windows app tool by which the report creator could enter the text blobs, the fields, their labels, and their display order. I am dreaming that I could write a generic SSRS "container" that could then be used to pull those fields in from the database and dynamically generate a report.

For the dynamic fields part, this could potentially entail dynamically generating the number of text fields needed (if SSRS can even be programmed like VB.NET) and assigning a value to them dynamically; OR just having a text field where I've pre-formatted those fields into one string. This could involve some dynamic SQL horribleness.

This could also not be the right tool for what I'm trying to accomplish; this is just what is currently being used. And that's what I'm trying to find out

Thanks in advance.

 

[xlbo]

generally not a good idea in summary!

SSRS uses data sets that have to be pre-defined so different numbers of fields and fields chaging names are pretty much a no-no

that said, if you know your max field number, you can create a dataset with that many fields and name them generically field1, field2 etc.

You use field1.value, field2.value for the values in your fields and then you need a way of refererncing the ACTUAL field names to put in the field header positions (field headers do not need to come from the same source as field values

Personally I think that the complexity behind the scenes outweighs much of the advantges of this kind of approach but that is only my opinion...


Rgds, Geoff

We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names and all are different colours but they all live in the same box.

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