Action Packed Maps in Your Reports

A couple weeks ago I went over some tips for customizing your maps in Reporting Services 2008 R2.  This week I'm going to stay on the same topic, but instead of customizing your legend ranges, I thought I'd go over a pretty cool interactive option that is available.  Now, the action I'm talking about is just like any other action that you can set to any object within your report, but the reason I like this so much is that you can apply the action to a spatial representation of your data.  The first thing you'll need to do to get started is make sure that you have a detail report that you can use your map to navigate to.  In most cases, this would be a report like "<something> by State".  And this report will also need an input parameter that you can feed a "state" value to.  Once you have your detail report ready you can start tricking out your map.  Your first step is to click somewhere in your map so you "Map Layers" menu pops up and then click on the dropdown arrow next to PolygonLayer.  Like so...

Once the property box opens, click on the "Action" tab and then the "Go to report" option.  From there, click the "Specify a report:" dropdown and select your detail report.  Then add your detail report parameter (in my case, "DealerStateState").

One thing you'll want to double check is that you're feeding the new report the right value.  Keep in mind that you have a parameter "Value field" and a "Label field".  As you can see in my example, the parameter that the detail report needs passed to it is much more than just the state name.  So you may need to apply an expression to the parameter value.

A pretty simple way to make sure you get the right values set is to open the properties for your parameter and check the "Value field:" under the "Available Values" tab.

Then open the Query Designer for the data set of your parameter, and execute the query.  In the result set, find the field that was listed in the "Value field:" of your parameter properties.  This is what you need to make sure the parameter value passed from your summary report looks like.

Now that you've made sure the value you're passing matches the type of value your detail report is expecting as an input, go back to your map report and preview!  You should see the pointing finger cursor when you hover over the individual states, letting you know that these figures are now interactive.  Click on one and it should take you straight to your detail report!

Good luck!  And I hope you enjoy your new action packed maps!