Advanced Report Design - Professional SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services - page 212

The document map may be shown or hidden using the leftmost icon in the report designer's Preview or
the Report Manager Report View toolbar.
Links and Drill-Through Reports
Any text box or image item can be used for intrareport or interreport navigation, for navigation to exter-
nal resources like web pages and documents, and also to send e-mail. All of these features are enabled
by using navigation properties that can be specified in the Textbox Properties or Image Properties dia-
log. First, open the Textbox Properties dialog by right-clicking the text box and selecting Properties from
the pop-out menu. In the Textbox Properties dialog, click the Advanced button to show the Advanced
Textbox Properties dialog, and then switch to the Navigation tab. In the Image Properties dialog, select
the Navigation tab.
Bookmarks and Links
A bookmark is a text box or image in a report that can be used as a navigational link. If you want to allow
the user to click an item and navigate to another item, assign a bookmark value to each of the target items.
To enable navigation to a bookmark, set the Jump to bookmark property to the target bookmark.
Using bookmarks to navigate within a report is very easy to do. Each report item has a BookMark prop-
erty that may be assigned a unique value. After adding bookmarks to any target items, use the Jump to
Bookmark Selection list to select the target bookmark in the Properties for the Source item. This allows
the user to navigate to items within the same report.
The Jump to URL option can be used to navigate to practically any report or document content on your
report server, and files, folders, and applications in your intranet environment or on the World Wide
Web. With some creativity, this may be used as a powerful, interactive navigation feature. It can also
be set to an expression that uses links stored in a database, custom code, or any other values. It's more
accurate to say that any URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) can be used since a web request is not limited
only to a web page or document. With some creative programming, queries, and expressions, your reports
could be designed to navigate to a web page, document, e-mail address, Web service request, or a cus-
tom web application, directed by data or custom expressions.
Just a word of caution: Reporting Services does not make any attempt to validate a URL passed in an
expression. If a malformed URL is used, the Report Server will return an error, and there is no easy way
to trap or prevent this from occurring. The most effective way to handle this issue is to validate the URL
string before passing it to the Jump to URL property.
Drill-Through Reports
This powerful feature enables a text box or image to be used as a link to another report by passing parame-
ter values to the target report. The target report can consist of a specific record or multiple records, depend-
ing on the parameters passed to the target report. The following example uses a Products by Category
report, similar to the one used in the last example, to demonstrate the use of grouped tables. The Product
Name text box is used to link to a report that will display the details of a single product record. The
Product Details report is very simple. It contains only text boxes and an image bound to fields of a data set
based on the Products table. This report accepts a ProductID parameter to filter the records and narrow
down to the record requested.