Reporting Services is very nice, but there seems to be a lot missing in the way of standard features you'd expect to see at the click of a button. Typically, these features are available with some work, but finding the right help can be hard. Hopefully, I can shed some light on a few of these capabilities. Let me know of any broken links as well as other links that might be useful.

Updated May 15, 2006

Sorting

Sorting in RS is kind of annoying. It's essentially a 2 or 3 part implementation - the third is optional and coincidentally, the worst part of the implementation. First, create parameters for the sort field (SortField) and order (SortOrder). Second, apply 2 sort expressions - one for ascending and one for descending. Third, if you want users to be able to click on column headers, add a navigation action to each header that points to the report and passes the sort parameters (note that you will need to calculate the sort order to support switching between ascending and descending order).

Ok, this all sounds nice, but let me cover the two harder parts in more detail. Step 2 requires 2 sorting expressions because the sort direction is not based on an expression. The work-around uses the following expressions for ascending and descending sorting, respectively: =IIF(Parameters!SortOrder.Value="Asc",Fields(Parameters!SortField.Value).Value,0) and =IIF(Parameters!SortOrder.Value="Desc",Fields(Parameters!SortField.Value).Value,0). Step 3 is more tedious to implement - especially if you have a lot of columns. Essentially, you have to add navigation action parameters for the sort field and order you want. The field is the easy part - just type it in (despite the fact that I hate these hard-coded values). The order has to take the currently selected field and order into consideration, =IIF(Parameters!SortField.Value="Column1" And Parameters!SortOrder.Value="Asc", "Desc", "Asc"). Not too hard, but when you have to do this for 20 columns, it gets annoying. I'm hoping RS05 simplifies on this. Optionally, I suggest setting every column you want to sort on to be underlined in order to identify it as clickable/sortable.

For a more detailed explanation on sorting, check out this article.

Functions

I finally found a decent list of functions available in RS. There is also a list of aggregate functions (i.e. Min, Max, Sum, Avg) maintained separately.