Pro SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services

CHAPTER 6  BUILDING REPORTS

For example, let’s assume that your intranet site has a home page that is designed specifically for

each employee discipline. An employee who is a home health aide would have a DisciplineID of HHA,

and your Web site designed for home health aides would be at http://webserver1/hha. Assuming that

the same is true for each discipline, it would be easy to add a URL link for each discipline to your report.

Just as you did for the bookmark link for Employee_Name, open the Action tab for the Discipline

field. Select Go to URL, and add the following expression:

="http://webserver1/" & Fields!DisciplineID.Value

When the DisciplineID field is selected within the report, the browser will open and connect to the

site of the specific employee’s discipline—for example, HHA for the home health aides site or RN for the

skilled nursing site.

Building the URL Link with a Report Parameter

Taking the concept one step further, if you had multiple Web servers at different locations or branches,

you would not want to hard-fix the Web server name in the URL string. Using a report parameter to

select the server name based on the branch location would make it possible to control the Web server

portion of the URL string that you created in the previous example. Let’s step through this procedure.

Figure 6-18 shows how the Report Parameter Properties dialog box should look.

Figure 6-18. Report Parameter Properties dialog box