Reporting services offers three types of actions. One of them is the “Jump to report” action, often used for a drill-through scenario where you jump from an overview report into a report that provides detailed data. Usually, the detailed report has parameters (such as the month and region for which we want to see the details) which are set by the overview report. So usually, end users do not need to see the parameters of the detail report, since they already set these parameters by invoking the action.

But sometimes, the detail report has parameters that still need to be set explicitly. Unfortunately, the parameter list is always collapsed, which might be confusing for end users. However, I didn’t discovered a way to convince Reporting services to show the parameter area… as long as we are using the jump to report action. But there is a “jump to URL” action as well, in which we can control the complete URL. If you combine that with the power of reporting services URL rendering, you can get a drill-through report with visible parameters. The price you pay is more work in writing the correct expressions to manually build the URL, which makes your report slightly more expensive to maintain… everything comes at a price…