Parameter Passing and Oracle Issues

I am relatively new to reporting services so I've been figuring this out as I go, but basically I am in the process of converting BI reports from another reporting service to the MS reporting services. The reports themselves have been recreated without a hitch but the parameters gave me issues. Frankly I needed more control over the parameters then RS allowed in order to match the features in the previous BI solution.

To solve this I decided to build a vb .net or asp .net front end and get the parameters, do whatever needs to be done, then pass them to a report viewer. Great, except a lot of my parameters are "from query" and the whole point of using these new reports is to avoid having oracle installed on the client computers. The only way I know of now to get these "from query" parameters is to run the query client side, meaning oracle needs to be installed.

Basically I am looking for either a way to obtain the "from query" parameter options from a report and pull them out for use in a vb.net or asp.net application, or another idea of how to get around this problem. Basically I want to be able to handle the parameters completely within the app, then just generate the report.

Hi Jeremicus,

A few thoughts:

Can you explain what you were trying to do with the parameters in the report that was causing you problems? We might be able to come up with a work around without having to go to an external source.

If you are creating an asp.net page, you should be able to query oracle and display the results without installing anything on the clients. Whatever odbc / oracle drivers you're using will be installed on the web server themselves.

You're not going to want to run a report to use data in an application. You should run the query directly in your application. Then if you want to display a report, you can pass the data using parameters.

HTH,

Jessica

|||Well my main problems with the parameters were things to do with multi-valued parameters. Basically in the previous reporting setup they could easily choose to leave input boxes blank, or put in a value, or put in multiple ones (either typing them in as a comma delimited string or selecting from a list).

Since the multi value parameters in RS wont allow you to not select something, this removes the ability to leave them blank, and the workarounds to avoid this aren't overly user friendly in the setting that these reports would be used, so basically I wanted to handle all that on my own and give more flexibility to the users and just do all the parameter formatting or other less pretty stuff 'behind the scenes'.

I might just go with the asp page instead of the application, I was kind of hoping for the app over the asp page but it'll have to do if I can't figure a way around this.
sql