Handling Report (RDL) Filters

I had a question from our Reporting Services book website that lead me to create a sample application to illustrate how to deal with filter arguments. IMHO, the mechanism used by the Report Designer is still not that great as it requires too much (non-VB-like) type coercion. That is, one constantly has to force the type of the TextBox values as well as the type of the left and right-hand side of expressions to match instead of having the report processor’s RDL interpreter just figure it out. I have attached a ZIP file that has the project used to illustrate several filtering techniques. Of course, it makes a lot of sense to filter the initial DataSet but you might want to give the user the ability to filter the fetched rowset so the query does not (necessarily) need to re-execute.

hth