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Running the Report from within Aras Innovator

March 11, 2026 07:04 AM
2 min read

For users to run the new Reporting Services Report from within Aras Innovator, you need to create an Innovator Report Item. The important settings to enable the Innovator Reporting Services interface are:

  • The Innovator Report Item name must be the same as the Reporting Services Report name.
  • The Location Field choice must be set to the new Service option.
  • The Report Query Field specifies the parameters that are passed to the Report Server.

Adding Aras Innovator Report Item

  1. Log into Aras Innovator as administrator.

  2. In the Navigation pane, go to Administration --> Reports. The menu shown in Figure 38 appears.

    Figure 38.

  3. Click Create New Report. A blank Report form appears:

    Figure 39.

  4. Enter the name of the Report.

    Note
    Again, this is the name you specified when you created the Report in Visual Studio.

  5. Select the Report Type, which in this case is Generic, meaning this Report is always available.
  6. Select the Report Location, which in this case is Service.

  7. Select the Report Target, which in this case is Window.

    Because this sample Report is of type ItemType, there is no Report query Value.

    Note
    If you use Firefox, you have to manually enter a stylesheet under the Stylesheet tab.

  8. Test the Report by clicking the Reports main menu bar choice.

    You should see the new User Report choice.

  9. Click the menu choice.

You should see a new dialog opened with the User Directory Report.

Passing Named Parameters to the ReportServer

As step 4 describes in section Installing Reporting Services, the value of the report_query Innovator Report Item Property is appended to the ReportServer URL, providing additional parameters to control the ReportServer.

For example, the ID of the Item can be passed as the Named Parameter @ID for the SQL Select for the Reporting Services Report as in this example:

  • SELECT * FROM [PROJECT] WHERE id=@ID

To pass the ID for the context Item (the selected Item) on the URL to the ReportServer, the Innovator Report Item report_query Property would look like this:

  • np:id=<xsl:value-of select="@id"/>

This is actually an XSLT stylesheet fragment and is the directive for Aras Innovator to add the string &id=ACBDEF0123456789ACBDEF0123456789 to the end of the ReportServer URL (but the actual ID value is used).

In this case, the Innovator Report is of the Generic type, so no ID is required, but perhaps we want the Reporting Services Report to be returned in the PDF or Excel format. We can control the ReportServer by adding the following parameter as the report_query value for the User Directory Report:

  • rs:Format=PDF

Figure 40.

Note
If you need to include more than one parameter for the report_query value, you need to use the &amp; Entity rather than the actual & symbol to delimit the parameters. Recall that the report_query value is eventually part of the query_string for the URL to the ReportServer but is actually an XSLT stylesheet fragment and so the special symbols like <, >, and & need to be protected in XML need to be entered as Entities &lt; &gt; and &amp; respectively.

For example, to pass the Named Parameter ID and Format PDF in the same report_query, the value would look like this:

  • np:id=<xsl:value-of select=”@id”/>&amp;rs:Format=PDF