Display Reporting Services drill through reports in new browser

Problem

When using the standard Reporting Services drill-through navigation the new report is rendered in the current browser window, therefore overlaying the original report. There is no built in way to indicate you want the drill-through report to open a new window. In a standard web browser you can use the (shift-click) functionality to open the link in a new window, but in Reporting Services this functionality is disabled. So how can you launch a new window when you open a drill-through report?

Solution

Use a little javascript with a customized URL in the “Jump to URL” option of the Navigation tab.

Non-parameterized Solution

To get started, let’s pop up a simple non parameterized report. Follow these instructions:

1. Instead of using the “Jump to Report” option on the Navigation tab, use the “Jump to URL” option.
2. Open the expression screen (Fx button).
3. Enter the following:

   ="javascript:void(window.open('http://servername?%2freportserver%2fpathto%2freport&rs:Command=Render'))"

4. Click OK twice, then save and deploy the report.

Note: The link will not work from the designer environment. You must deploy the report (hopefully to a test area) to try the link.

See screenshots below.

That’s the easy part, ready for a more dynamic approach?

Parameterized Solution

Now, let’s say you want to pass a variable to the drill through report. Let’s also assume you have a field called ProductCode. Normally, you might hard code that like this:

http://servername/reportserver?%2fpathto%2freport&rs:Command=Render&ProductCode=123

In this case, you want to pass variables dynamically, using an available value from the source dataset.

You can think of it like this:

http://servername/reportserver?%2fpathto%2freport&rs:Command=Render&ProductCode=Fields!ProductCode.Value

The exact syntax in the “Jump to URL” (Fx) expression window will be:

="javascript:void(window.open('http://servername/reportserver?%2fpathto%2freport&rs:Command=Render&ProductCode="+Fields!ProductCode.Value+"'))"

Note – To avoid confusion between double and single quotes, double quotes are in red above.

Notice, that the static portion of the URL is delimited within double quotes.

Next Steps

• Next time you build drill-through report capabilities look at using this method to open a new browser instead of overlaying the original report
• Look at your existing reports to see if this method makes more sense for your report navigation
• Stay tuned for other Reporting Services tips from this author