Hey Andy,
Great article, but finished up with:
I particularly like its ease of use and its superb error messages (other Microsoft departments could learn a lot from the SSRS team).
Are you new to SSRS? 🙂 I'm regularly coming across totally cryptic or deceptive error messages in SSRS 2008 such as the following:
[rsInvalidFilterValueDataType] A filter value in the filter for tablix ‘tabData’ specifies a data type that is not supported by the 'TopN' operator. Verify that the data type for each filter value is Integer.
Although it worked perfectly well in Preview mode in the report designer, this error message appeared when the report was actually deployed. In the end it turned out that the Value field for a Top N expression (in Dataset properties / Filters) I had "20" instead of "=20". Now to me "20" is an integer value and "=20" is an expression - but who am I to argue with the great SSRS team?
Kind regards,
Anthony.