CHAPTER 6 BUILDING REPORTSFor the Patient Survey Letter report, you will use a modified version of the Emp_Svc_Cost stored
procedure that includes a parameter for the PatID field. The reason for doing this is because the Textbox
control does not support filter criteria, and you will need to limit the letter to one patient as it is linked
with a single parameter. For merge letters, it is of course possible to use more than one patient. To show
both linking to another report and to demonstrate the new textbox formatting, we simply wanted to
show the basics of both.
Let’s look at the Patient Survey Letter report and the textbox with rich formatting. As you may recall
from Chapter 4, textboxes now support placeholders, which can be simple and complex expressions as
well as HTML code imported from a table. You will combine elements of each to produce a simple letter
addressed to an individual patient. As you can see in Figure 6-20, the letter itself consists of one textbox
and one table. The textbox contains a placeholder at its beginning, titled Template_Letter_Header. This
placeholder gets its formatting via HTML imported from a dataset that stores the HTML tags in a field.
Figure 6-20. Patient Survey Letter report with multiple placeholders
The HTML code is derived from the Format table in the Pro_SSRS database. You can see the sample
output of the field in Figure 6-21.