Dynamic Sorting Using Parameters in SSRS

The other day, someone requested that a report in SSRS be sorted differently by default. While that might make sense if everyone wants it that way, more than likely you might have people that want a report sorted differently by default. How to do it?

There are probably a few ways, but this is what I did.

First, I added two parameters. “SortByDefault” and “SortOrder”

The “SortByDefault” will be a drop down of your columns you want to sort by for your dataset (or group, or table/tablix)

The “SortOrder” is simply Asc (1 to N, A to Z) and Desc (N to 1, Z to A)

Now, here is how mine look:

SortByDefault (I have two columns I want to allow sorting by, PointsLeft and StackRank):

SortOrder:

Now comes the fun stuff: Making it work.

Make sure you remove any “ORDER BY” in your dataset (you don’t have to but this makes it easier).

I also have every column in the report set up for interactive sorting based on the column header/column it shows, but not sure that is necessary here, I just wanted to put that out there just in case

You want to get to your sorting options. So in my case, I have a tablix, so get to your tablix property window and the sorting option:

Now you can see, my “Sort By” and “Then By” are expressions. It is kind of weird here. Also you can’t set expressions for “Asc” or “Desc” so what I had to do was trick it somewhat.

the first is to handle the asc option:

=IIF(Parameters!SortOrder.Value=”Asc”,Fields(Parameters!SortByDefault.Value).Value,0)

the second is to handle the desc option

=IIF(Parameters!SortOrder.Value=”Desc”,Fields(Parameters!SortByDefault.Value).Value,0)

You can see, some magic. If the order by is XYZ then use the field, otherwise 0. If you notice from the screenshot, first one is A to Z (Asc) and the second one is Z to A (Desc). So we are basically telling SSRS to sort by the param or not based on the order by option and it chooses the right order by (ASC/DESC). I think this was easier in SQL 2000 SSRS 🙂

Well now you should be able to test your report and try to sort orders. What I did next is make my params hidden. The defaults are what I wanted for the existing report (Order By PointsLeft DESC), and what I did next is create a linked report and set the hidden parameters int he report options in Report Manager to (Order By Stack Rack, ASC)

Now I have one report, with hidden sorting params and I can create linked reports with different sort options without having to create a new report. I could add all columns to the choices, or even let users choose as parameters (but they already have interactive sorting in this case).

Happy Report Buildin’!