SSRS embedded code and dynamic columns

[dove11]

The first 3 columns of my report are dynamic, depending entirely on parameters passed to the stored procedure. The result set from the stored procedure is used as the dataset in my Reporting Services report. Sometimes there are fields that are not returned in the result set and I wanted to display blanks if they weren't there. I tried all the tricks using iif(isNothing(Fields!field1.Value, "",Fields!field1.Value) and using Fields(Parameters!parm1.value).Value in my argument list. Neither of these worked. I created 3 textboxes in my report (table) and placed the three different values in them, i.e., Fields!field1.Value, Fields!field2.Value, and Fields!field3.Value. In certain cases, one or two of these fields would not be returned in the result set. I made them hidden. Then in my other textbox, where I wanted to display the value, I added as the expression, Code.DetermineFieldValue(Parameters!parm1.value, ReportItems!txtTextBox1.Value, ReportItems!txtTextBox2.Value, ReportItems!txtTextBox3.Value) I did this for each of the 3 textboxes, just replacing parm1 with parm2 or parm3. In the embedded code, the function was defined as: public function DetermineField(value1 as object, value2 as object, value3 as object, value4 as object) as object I just refered to my fields as value1 through value4 and it worked. I have been trying this for about a week and couldn't get anything to work. Apparently, it will accept the textbox not having a value, but cannot handle the dataset field directly if it is not returned. It never got to the code. Hope this helps someone. Dove11

[pmarfleet]

Your post is difficult to read. To make it more understandable, you should use the and tags to format your code. You can't bind a report control to a field in your data source and then not return the field. I had the same issue a couple of years ago when developing reports that allowed the user to pick up to 3 fields to group the data on. If less than 3 grouping fields were selected, some of the grouping columns needed to be hidden. I got round this problem by writing my stored procedures to pad out the resultset with extra 'dummy' fields if less than 3 grouping fields were selected. This way, the resultset would always have the same 'shape' and my data binding expressions would always work. In the report, I would then hide the grouping columns that were not required. Paul Marfleet