For sometime a group of Program Managers from the SQL BI team have been working with a customer, Barnes and Noble, to produce a SQL BI solution for their data warehouse and analysis needs using SQL 2005.  The leasons learnt from all their work is being continually published to this website http://www.microsoft.com/sql/bi/projectreal/default.mspx in the form of webcasts and whitepapers.  With so many new tools and functionality to play with in SQL 2005, I have found their work (what I’ve seen of it so far), to be invaluable. 

Sudhi recently asked me how to call an aspx page from a report and pass a parameter held in a textbox, or other control.

My solution is:

Drag a textbox control on to the report and enter the value “2005/07/28/408325″ (without the the quotes) in to it.  If this is a new report the textbox should be called textbox1 - visible in the properties dialogbox (usually bottom right) .

Right click on your textbox (even the cells in tables and matrixes contain textboxes) and choose Properties -> Advanced button -> Navigation Tab - ‘Jump to URL:’ textbox and press the ‘fx’ button on the right hand side.  This takes you into the Expression Editor, here you enter the following in the ‘Expression:’ textbox on the right hand side.

=”http://blogs.technet.com/mat_stephen/archive/” & reportitems!textbox1.value & “.aspx”

‘Ok’ all the dialogs back to your report - run the report and click on the textbox - heypresto!

If you’re in the UK and you’d like to get your hands on the ‘Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Preview Software’ then please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsserversystem/sql/2005/evaluate.aspx

when I was over in the US recently, I attended a ‘Bill Baker and team unplugged’ session, (Bill is the GM for SQL Server Business Intelligence).  Reporting Services Report packs came up as a topic for discussion.  The team asked the audience if the Report Packs had been well recieved, to which I quickly responded ‘yes’, judging by the feedback I’ve had from my blog.  So then we were asked to submit ideas for new Report Packs.  If you have any suggestions for Report Packs you would like to see, submit them to me (via a comment would be good) and I will ensure they end up in front of the right person.