Adding Linkbacks to Report Index

Some of our users access reports directly through bookmarks or through the Reporting Services pages directly (https://reports.winona.edu/Reports). In this case they don't ever see the documentation of the report that we maintain in the Report Index.

As a solution we are starting to place links back to the Report Index on our reports. This page outlines the best practices for this so that:

• 1. We have a consistent look and feel for the end-user

  2. We can automate checks that all reports catalogued in the Report Index have these links embedded in them.

The best practices are:

• 1. Create a text box under the report title. It should align on the left with the report title and be set pretty wide. The text box should be named "ReportIndexLink". We may rely on that name for automating checks.

  2. Set the font of the text in the text box to Arial 10pt and the rest defaults (not bold, etc).

  3. The text in this textbox will be the expression below. Notice that we use JavaScript for "interactive" rendering (online or in Visual Studio), but standard HTML for other situations (export to Excel or PDF).

  4. ="More information about this report can be found at <a href=" & IIF(Globals!RenderFormat.IsInteractive, "javascript:void(window.open('" & First(Fields!ReportIndexURL.Value, "ReportIndexURL") & "'))", "'" & First(Fields!ReportIndexURL.Value, "ReportIndexURL") & "'") & ">" & First(Fields!ReportIndexURL.Value, "ReportIndexURL") & "</a>."

  5. Select the expression in the text box, right click and click "Placeholder properties". Under the Markup Type section select "HTML - Interpret HTML tags as styles".

  6. Create a dataset named "ReportIndexURL". This is where we'll store the URL of the Report Index page that documents this report. This abstraction is used to help automate checks in the future. The data source on the query doesn't matter, the query should be similar to:

  7. select 'https://mywsu.winona.edu/sites/Reports/Report%20Index/Admissions%20Scholarship%20Registration.aspx' ReportIndexURL

An example of this technique is the Admissions Awards report at https://reports.winona.edu/Reports/Pages/Report.aspx?ItemPath=%2fAdmissionsWorkflowReports%2fAwards.

A report that shows a list of SSRS reports in the Report Index that are not linked back to the Report Index as above is at https://reports.winona.edu/Reports/Pages/Report.aspx?ItemPath=%2fITS%2fReporting+Services%2fReports+not+Linked+Back+to+Report+Index&SelectedSubTabId=GenericPropertiesTab.