Saving Report Criteria

[Michael Love]

Hi there.

I have a need to capture the filtering criteria that a user selects and save it as an item in their "My Reports" section. I think how this would work is you would create a canned report that a user can run and select the criteria that makes sense for them, then executes the report. When the report gets created, the user would be able to save the criteria so they can run the report quickly the next time.

Also, is there anyway to have the user select which columns of data they want to see as well?

Just seeing if it can be done with Telerik.

Thanks, Mike

[Steve]

Hello Michael,

As you probably know, Telerik Reports are standard .NET classes and according to our best practices, we recommend that they are contained within a class library, which is referenced in the actual project that would show the reports (be it web or winforms) - this way the reports are compiled into a single assembly. Telerik Reporting is an embedded reporting engine and not a standalone report server and usually it is part of a Desktop or Web Application. Thus there is no way to "save" an actual report into a "local" file that can be latter re-used as a report in a manner similar to Crystal Reports.
As for your second question, such functionality is usually handled by an end user designer, where the users create the report layouts. Since we lack such feature (in our TODO list), the only possible way to do that is to create the report entirely programmatically based on user input from some kind of "input form" on your application. The other possible approach is to create several different reports so that all possible "layouts" are covered and shows them based on the user input.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Michael Love]

Hi Steve.

Thanks for the response. Let me clarify my first question a bit. Let's say I have a "canned" report that I have created the layout for and it gives sales figures for the entire company for all of their products. Sally works in the midwest region and is concerned with toothpaste sales only. So, Sally runs the "canned" report and selects the midwest region only as a filtering criteria (from the list of all regions) and toothpaste as the only product from their list of all products and then executes the report.

What I wanted to do was have the ability for Sally to save her report filtering criteria and store that in the database somewhere as "Sally's Midwest Toothpast Sales Report". Saving this would actually just create a row in a "My Reports" table that listed the user, the base or "canned" report name, then have an xref table for associated filtering criteria - meaning the "midwest" and "toothpaste" criteria. Then, the next time Sally, wants a Midwest toothpaste report, she would not reexecute the company wide sales report (and have to go pick those criteria again), she would just execute "Sally's Midwest Toothpast Sales Report" where the code (custom) would go get which report to run and with what filtering criteria and reexecute the report.

Does that make more sense?

Mike

[Steve]

Hello Michael,

Thank you for the clarification. I see two possible approaches for accomplishing such scenario:

• Create your own parameter UI for handling the parameters and Preview button. As you know our built-in parameters do not expose any events which you can use to save the parameter selections. This way after you save these values you can set default values for the report params "Region" and "Product" upon next run of the report from this user.
• Change the underlying database query directly, based on the saved selection, so that only the relevant data is loaded in the report, instead of all data being loaded and filtered on report level. Such example is shown in this video: Telerik Reporting - Design Time Support for Parameterized Queries.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Paul]

It's been almost 2 years since this question was posted. Has there been any change to the report viewer object which exposes any events to grab the parameter data?

I would also like to capture the selected parameters to allow the user to save them and re-run the same report later (with the same parameters).

Thank You,

Paul