Display selected values of multi-value parameter in tablix rows

Question

I am designing a report for SSRS. I want the user requesting the report to be able to specify, when they generate the report, from a pre-defined selection some values which should be displayed in a tablix on the report.

I have therefore created a multi-value parameter and populated the Available Values with the options I want the user to be able to select from, and, as expected, when the report is generated the user is able to select one or more of these values.

However, what I now want to do is include a tablix in the report, and display a row for every value in the multi-value parameter that the user selected, with the value displayed in the first cell of the row.

If the values were coming from a data table this would obviously be easy. I've also found answers on how to show all of the selected parameter values in a single textbox using the JOIN function, but I don't want to do that.

The only solution I can think of is to replicate the list of available values in the multi-value parameter in a tablix manually, and link the visibility of each row of the tablix to the selected state of the corresponding value in the multi-value parameter, but that's not very elegant and increases the effort involved in maintaining the report definition.

Any ideas on how to do this? I know the selected values from the parameter simply form an array, but I can't see how to bind a tablix to any data that isn't in a dataset, or how to create a dataset from the parameter values.

Answer 1

Considering that a tablix sources from a dataset, I did some experiments to see how to create a low maintenance solution for you.

Option 1 : Create a data set with hard-coded options to match your multi-value parameter and select those options WHERE they exist in the parameter.

Example:

 SELECT val
    FROM (
        SELECT 'opt1' as val
        UNION SELECT 'opt2'
        UNION SELECT 'opt3'
        UNION SELECT 'opt4') a
    WHERE val IN (@Param)

Thoughts: easier to maintain than visibility on a table, but still two hard-coded places within the report.

Option 2 : Create a dataset that selects the multi-value parameter and splits it by each value. This was my first idea, but I ran into some issues with determining how to actually select the multi-value without a syntax error. I came up with a method that creates a deliminated string in the report and than parsed that string back into rows in the dataset:

Step 1) Within the dataset properties, on the parameter tab, join the multiple values together with a JOIN expression

Step 2) Create a simple query which uses the new SQL Server 2016 function string_split. Note that your database compatibility level MUST be 130 or higher to use this function (SQL 2016+). If this isn't your scenario, there are many string split functions that you can find on Stack Overflow to achieve the same thing.

Fun problem!