Populating a wide table with SSRS text parameter with a delimiter - text

Question

I am trying to populate a table variable in SSRS and call a SP subsequently to process the data in it:
DECLARE #Tbl1 TABLE
(
D01 float,
D02 float,
D03 float,
D04 float,
D05 float,
...
D96 float
)
To populate it I use a text parameter #LS. The input is comma delimited string with 96 elements:
0.635316969,0.756943899,0.890520142,1.028008362,1.166350106,1.30511861,1.444527254,1.580948571,1.578743639,1.575542931,1.573195746,1.571346448,1.571275321,1.56992391,1.568003484,1.567221089,1.556836567,1.543820351,1.53037, ...., ,0.514543561
In a dataset I tried to populate the table first (after table variable declaration):
insert into #Tbl1
VALUES (#LS)
But got this error at run-time: "Column name or number of supplied values does not match table definition."
I tried JOIN(SPLIT()) with comma without luck. Any ideas?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem is the the #LS parameter is a single-value text parameter so you can't use it like that - you'd need to use a multi-value parameter.
So let's try something different. You don't need to create a temporary table because you could build your column values to give a dataset that you want using Sql like this:
SELECT 0.635316969 AS D01, 0.756943899 AS D02, ... , 0.514543561 AS D96
Fortunately almost everything in SSRS is an expression, so we just need to build this Sql statement dynamically from the #LS parameter using an expression. Go to the Report menu then Report Properties... and click the Code tab. Enter the following code:
Function MakeSql(LS As String) As String
Dim Sql As String
Dim Values() As String
Dim i As Integer
Sql = "SELECT "
Values = Split(LS, ",")
For i = 0 To Values.Length - 1
Sql = Sql + Values(i) + " AS D" + Right("0" + CStr(i+1), 2) + ", "
Next i
Sql = Left(Sql, Len(Sql) - 2) ' Remove trailing comma
Return Sql
End Function
So what we are doing is splitting the string into an array of values which we loop through to create a Sql statement that aliases these values to the field names we want.
Right-click your dataset, choose Dataset Properties and press the fx button beside the query textbox. This allows us to enter a text expression for our Sql statement rather than an actual Sql statement. Here we need to call the custom code function we created above which will insert our custom built Sql expression:
=Code.MakeSql(Parameters!LS.Value)
Make sure your dataset has the fields D01 to D96 (you'll have to set these up manually because SSRS can't analyse the Sql expression to determine the field values) and you're done!