What?
This article serves to describe several workarounds or proofs of concept.

Why?
We have a first report which acts like a search page. You enter the student you are looking for by reference or name and if there is only 1 result in the results page, then we want it to redirect to the details report for that student automatically.

How?
So there are various solutions out there, here's an overview of some:

Method #1

1. Create one report with all selectable reports as subreports - toggle visibilty based on parameter.

Method #2

1. Add a button below "View Report" linked to some script code (requires change to ASP pages on the ReportingServer, ie. affects all reports on that server).

Method #3

1. Use ASP instead of SSRS.

Method #4

1. Use a TimeInterval refreshing the page after a certain time.

Conclusion
In the end, this came down to a design decision. Time spent on trying to find a solution was not considered to be warranted. My reports use a parameter for the connection string to specify which server and database to connect to and the follow on link was enough as a solution. My seniors advised that if we had time in the future we could expand on this further.


Google Searches that got me nowhere:

• ssrs process parameter after report execution
• auto-redirect after are a report is run
• ssrs vbscript post report processing
• ssrs auto redirect based on a dataset value

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So I'm looking for a SQL query that could do this all in one go and return all the results in one table.

With PHP & MySQL it's pretty simple: use individual SQL queries to get the count of yesterday, yesterweek, yestermonth, yesteryear and do the layout in PHP.

Now let's say I have one RDL or SSRS Solution. I could do a dataset per SQL query but it doesn't seem that ideal.

In Theory:

So I find myself using date ranges endlessly as I've been working in SSRS. The below is derived from a collection of various sources across the web as well as some of my own. These are what worked in my environment: WinXP, BIDS (vs2008), TFS (vs2010), SSRS 2008 R2. The following examples assume today's date is Wednesday 03 August 2011 @ 11:46:

This Week:

-- Start Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()) // yields: 8/1/2011

-- End Date (US format - mm/dd/yyyy)
=DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())) // yields: 8/7/2011

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-- Start Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today()), "dd/MM/yyyy") //yields 01/08/2011

-- End Date (european format - dd/mm/yyyy)
=Format(DateAdd("d", -1, DateAdd("d", 7-(WeekDay(Today(),2))+1, Today())), "dd/MM/yyyy") // yields: 07/08/2011

This Month:

The situation is that we are replacing a website-application with a single SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS 2008 R2) report. We're using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS VS2008) with Team Foundation Server (TFS VS2010) and connecting to an Oracle database (ie. "seamless integration because our setup is perfect and well thought through" not - note the DBMS is not hugely relevant for the purposes of this article).

The end-user must be able to search on EITHER the student's username or the student's ID (2 report parameters: @StudentADAccount [varchar] and @StudentReference [int] respectively). Most of the remaining datasets use the resulting @StudentReference number in their "where" clause. A student always has a "Student Reference" but not necessarily a student AD account (enquired/applied only).

Situation
The requirement in a lot of my reports in SSRS has always been a date range rather than just the one date. The user must be allowed to select all results between two dates instead of just specifying the one day. If the second parameter (ToDate) is the same as the first (FromDate), then the range is for that particular date.

Solution

This must have been so obvious to everyone else that nobody bothered to write an article on it... till now.

Situation
I have a report that returns room bookings based on a user and given a date range. The problem is that there are a few thousand users and Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services interface isn't the most fun to scroll endlessly down. Advanced users can type the name really fast for it to auto-scroll down to the desired name. Our advanced users are exceptions to the rule.

Problem

1. Open a Windows Explorer and make a duplicate of the report that you want to use as a template.
2. Rename the copy (suffix with template?)
3. Remove objects unique to the report and leave elements for all reports.
4. File > Save selected item as...
5. For SSRS 2008: Save in the folder: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject"
6. Done!

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Update August 2011
So I don't know how many people were just saying why don't you do the following:

1. Bring up the "Tablix Properties" of the dataset
2. Look for the section "No Rows"
3. Put in a value for "NoRowsMessage".

This solution hides the entire Tablix which kinda defeats the purpose of having anything there. I want my end-users to have faith in my report. The report just returning blank can also mean "I don't know". I want the report to either return the correct value or say "No data found". My end-users would otherwise ask is the data value reliable if it's blank?

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The long way of doing this
I would have called this article "Iteration within SQL Server Reporting Services Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) version 2008 through combining Transact-SQL and MDX expressions" but boy what a mouthful, and it's not really iterating anymore. So it's "SSRS Hide results table if empty" though I will add that if you wanted to put a message instead of hiding the table then following the below will also let you do this (requirements: common sense or the IQ of a duck).

It's what I've been searching for for the past hour and although you may think I'm just adding to the cyberspace pile of useless info, at least I'm not just copying and pasting from other sites to add content to my own. And I'm not just adding content, the way I'm doing the below is nothing similar to what I googled (probably a bad sign but time is ticking and no one has forever).