Ampersands Gone Wild

Thanks for the Geoff’s feedback on the discussion list, today I was able to demystify one of the SSRS-SSAS integration “gotchas” that has been pestering me for quite some time.

Sometimes a report may need the Jump to URL navigational feature to open a parameterized OLAP report. Since the UDM member unique names contain & (to designate the key), I have been unable to find a way to construct a Javascript link that correctly escapes & in the report parameters, e.g.:

="javascript:void(window.open('http://localhost/ReportServer?/OLAP/Daily Product Sales&DateTimeIndex=[Date].[Time Index].&[2003]&SalesTerritoryGroup=[Sales Territory].[Group].&[North America]&rs:Command=Render’))"

Here, the Daily Product Sales report takes two parameters (DateTimeIndex and SalesTerritoryGroup). As I mentioned in Chapter 8 of my book, even if you use the escape code of ampersand %26 (or the escape Javascript function), the browser will “helpfully” unescape the value back to & and the Report Server will choke. The trick is to use %2526 instead of just %26, as the next example shows:

="javascript:void(window.open('http://localhost/ReportServer?/OLAP/Daily Product Sales&DateTimeIndex=[Date].[Time Index].&2526[2003]&SalesTerritoryGroup=[Sales Territory].[Group].&2526[North America]&rs:Command=Render’))"

%2526 is needed in a javascript call with Jump to URL because it gets processed by the browser twice. %2526 goes to %26 which goes to &.