Jason
Jason

Reputation: 107

SSRS - embed URL and formatting characters in parameter

I'm making a form letter in SSRS 2012 that will be delivered by email. I had it working fine but now the powers that be have requested a much more dynamic aspect to it based on the individual recipient... Different paragraphs now need to be included/excluded based on the target.

With that, I pulled the body of the email out of SSRS and am now assembling it in SQL Server and passing it over to SSRS as a parameter (so that I don't wind up making a dozen SSRS reports to handle the need).

I have that part working too now, but hit a snag... There were a few bullet points as well as URL's that could look nicer. I'd like to force an indention before the bullet points and replace www.mysite.com with something prettier like "Click Here". On the SSRS side of the fence, I currently just have a single text box (and ideally would keep it that way) which contains an expression that references my "EmailBody" parameter.

So far, I have not found the right combination of words to send to Google to see if this is possible, so I figured I'd go straight to the pros here. I did try formatting the output in a similar manner to what an expression would look like ( ="This is the body of my email" ) and it just passed that straight on through to the final output.

Any ideas would be appreciated! Jason

Upvotes: 1

Views: 648

Answers (2)

StevenWhite
StevenWhite

Reputation: 6034

Sounds like you're on the right track with the HTML markup. I also wanted to suggest that you can use a data-driven subscription. Have the query generate the HTML you want. Then have that populate the body of the email. That way there's no need for any attachments. This has come in handy when I wanted to display a small table of data for viewing on a mobile device rather than having to open an Excel attachment.

Upvotes: 0

Jason
Jason

Reputation: 107

In case it helps anyone else, I figured out the secret.

Change your text box in SSRS to expect HTML by right-clicking on the placeholder (<< EXP >>) inside the text box, selecting Placeholder Properties, and change the Markup Type to "HTML - Interpret HTML tags as styles".

After that, go back to the SQL Server side of the fence and change the text you are sending as a parameter to HTML with whatever styling properties you desire.

Upvotes: 1

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