A Report that uses its location

A customer had many copies of the same report – one for each site. And the application database had multiple copies of each table – one for each site. The table names were all appended with the sites name EG: “WP London_SalesHeader”, “WP Barcelona_SalesHeader” etc.

In Report Manager there was a folder for each site, containing sub-folders for different categories of report (EG: /London/Sales, OR /London/Production).

This is a simplified account of how I created a Report that returned only information specific to its location.

In Report Builder I created a hidden parameter called @site of type Text with no “Available Values” and its “Default Values” using the global variable ReportFolder.

As the output from this built-in variable would be like “\Paris\Sales” I had to create an expression for the “Default Value” of @site searching through each site name in turn …

=IIf(Globals!ReportFolder.Contains("Barcelona"),"WP Barcelona",
IIf(Globals!ReportFolder.Contains("Paris"),"WP Paris", "WP London"))

Finally, in the report query I derived the table name using the @site parameter.

declare @cmd varchar(max) = 
'select	[SalesCode],
	[Description],
	[NetWeight],
	[SalesDate]
from	[Production].[dbo].[' + @site + '_SalesHeader]'

exec(@cmd)

(NB: As a best-practice I displayed the value of @site, along with the other parameter choices, in the report sub-title.)