SSRS Adding text box that accepts input for printing

Question

Using Business Intelligence Development Studio, I am creating a report for SSRS that requires the user to add a few notes before being printed. The notes do not need to be sent back to the SQL Server that the report is being generated from, they just need to be included when the report is printed or exported. I have some other solutions including:

• Exporting to Word for edit, then the user can manually publish to pdf & send
• Including parameters for the note fields which involves pulling the report, then adding in the notes and lastly re-pulling the report again to include the data

But I really don't want to add the extra steps to the user's process unless necessary. Has anyone tried this before? I've been tinkering and searching and have had no luck.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Input to an SSRS report comes from data sources and the parameters. Some server settings are applied, but all the per-report stuff is from either of those two places.

Based on the OP comment, I would add a text parameter that allows blank values. You can set a default value of ="" so that the report will run on first access. Then any text the users adds can be inserted into the report simply by referring to the parameter's value.(=Parameters!MyParam1.Value)

Answer 2

user is pulling the report first to analyze the data. So they would pull it once, then add the notes, and then pull the report again with the parameters added.