Yes, well don't laugh, I could not find this on the WWW so I was obviously not using Google properly.  Anyway here's just a quick note on how to do if else statements in Report Builder 2.0

I'm looking at the following if statement:

If (MyFieldName = 0) Then
     Return 1
Else
     Return MyFieldName

Can be expressed as:

IIf(Fields!MyFieldName.Value = 0, 1, Fields!MyFieldName.Value)

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• SQL Server 2008
• Report Builder 2.0
• BMC Service Desk Express 9.8

• Incident #
• Group Name
• Close Date & Time
• Assigned to Full Name
• Incident Type

Basically I thought that the regional settings of a report generated using Report Builder 2.0 on a MS SQL Server 2008 instance were dependent on either the server or the client machine.  Realised that this was actually specified in the report. Here's a quick note on how to set Dates and Times used in parameter fields to UK format (dd/MM/yyyy).

Once again I've spent a whole morning going in the wrong direction with a convincing SQL script. This article is just a note on when using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or Report Builder 2.0 and when previewing the report, the parameters are not accounted for (ie. the SQL query creating the dataset does not use the parameters in its query).


Problems:

• Given a date, the date format was reverting to US format as opposed to European
• Given a Campus as a text value, the SQL query was ignoring this completely
• Hardcoding the scalar local variables worked

This is just a note for me as it took a while to find on the net and even then it was confusing as to why it works but it does. Not sure whether you call this an MDX Query or part of a Transact-SQL mashup. You need to go to "Fill" (of each text box in the row - unless there's a faster way) and instead of color, click on the expression button (fx) and use the following:

=IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "#ffffff", "#eeeeee")

or 

=IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "WhiteSmoke", "Garamond")

This is telling the report to be white (=#ffffff) in row 1 (odd row numbers) and a very light grey (=#eeeeee) in row 2 (even row numbers). The first row being of all rows in the dataset and not for a particular drill-down item. It will alternate between the two for the rest of the report. [The second example is what I use most frequently].

Thought I'd put a note on how to remove the toolbar using the URL as I didn't find this clear on the net. Tried it and it didn't work. That's because I was using the Reporting Manager URL rather than the Reporting Server URL.

I thought I'd put something here as there are lots of posts like this on forums (a lot of which seem to be copied & pasted from other sites) but they refer to SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005.

This is how to do it in SQL Server 2008 and creating a report in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) or MS Report Builder.

Scenario
I have a report that specifies some room bookings for a particular week. When I open the report, each drilldown row is collapsed (as opposed to expanded). The user can specify the date as it's a report parameter.

What we want
The user will select a date. We want the report to open with the specified day expanded and the remaining days that week to be collapsed (hidden). The first time I did this, I couldn't expand the remaining days so don't forget to tick the option "display can be toggled by this report item" like I did. ahem...

Well I tried and I spent a few hours searching the net for a solution which displays the hours in the top columns, and undefined number of rooms in the rows. No all I was looking for was a calendar showing 1 day with the hours on the top. Working hours only as well...

Ok I admit I only googled for about 1 hour before I gave up and just wrote my own. Saying that it's taken me 4 hours just to do the below... hopefully it will be quicker next time now that I noted it all down.