Reporting Services Parameters and Oracle

Recently a colleague of mine needed to access Oracle to build a report but did not have the rights to create a stored procedure, which would be the obvious method of choice. We therefore need to pass parameters from Reporting Services to Oracle using the “Query Type” of text.  To do this in SQL Server it is relatively intuitive.

Create a shared Data Source – I have used Adventure Works.

Then add a DataSet:

This query will return all records from the Adventure Works ‘people’ table,  showing the following fields; FirstName, MiddleName, LastName and Email Address. If you wanted to restrict this list using a parameter, all you would need to do is add a parameter to the report.

In this instance I have added a parameter titled “EndsWith”, so we can use a WHERE with any character or string to filter by the last characters of the FirstName.  I have also added a parameter called “BeginsWith”. Now you can edit the DataSet to add the where statement as follows:

SELECT     FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, EmailAddress
FROM         Person.Contact
WHERE     (FirstName LIKE @BeginsWith +’%’ + @EndsWith)

Now this will work perfectly with SQL Server, however should you wish to connect to Oracle, you will need to make a few simple, but not obvious, changes.  These are as follows:

SELECT     FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, EmailAddress
FROM         Person.Contact
WHERE     (FirstName LIKE :BeginsWith +’%’ + :EndsWith)

So in short all you have to do is change the @ sign to a : (colon), easy when you know how, a real pain when you don’t!

This report will appear as follows when connected to Oracle, or SQL (as long as there are the same databases).