Boyan Penev on Microsoft BI

In Reporting Services we already have a refresh button:

which refreshes the displayed report data. Users, though, tend to click the View Report button instead and it is sometimes necessary to enforce a data refresh every time a user clicks on View Report.

Normally, the View Report button should be used when a report user changes the report parameters and Reporting Services will try to retrieve data from the data store after clicking it only if some parameter value has changed.

Using this knowledge, we can set up a dummy internal parameter which changes its value constantly. If we want to make sure the report value changes, we can build a datetime parameter with available and current value of Now() – which returns the current date and time and will always be different between clicks on View Report.

A possible issue with this way of enforcing data refresh is that the report cache will never be used, thus possibly causing a performance problem. However, if performance is less desirable than avoiding the need to educate our users this report “hack” may be quite useful.

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Boyan Penev SSRS Reporting Services