Hi,
I am watching videos trying to learn how to actually use SSRS instead of fumbling my way through trial and error 
There are some neat things that I would like to add to some of our reports to make them more user friendly but they donât seem to work.
#1: Sorting by a header: Is it because we are looking at a PDF when we print preview from Epicor?
#2: Drill through reports: It would be wonderful to be able to open a more detailed report right from the one the user is looking at (i.e. opening a time phase from a BAQ report) but I add the interactivity and nothing happens. Is it because the report needs to be generated by Epicor to run?
#3: Collapsing Groups: We have BAQ reports that are pages of data grouped by part number and it would be nice to have them all collapsed at first so the user can open the one(s) they want to look at.
Way back when, I stumbled across something âusefulâ in using the âdata tagsâ. It wonât solve all or maybe even none of these, but it can be used to improve what is the output to PDF. Give me a little bit and I will figure out how best to share.
Ms. Melissa here is my 2 cents:
If you are OnPrem (servers on premise) you have to option to have ssrs Query the DB directly, use a SQL View, and use Drill-Downs by running the reports from the SSRS Server.
However, if you do that you will have to âexposeâ your db to an external link (not recommended - unless you use a Mirror site for reporting) and you will be missing and have to prompt for all of the Context parameters, ie. Company, Plant, UserID, Language, Currency, etc.
If you are Epicor Cloud based - then the only direct DB access option is a service Epicor offers to mirror to the SQL DB of your choice. However, my understanting is that not ALL of the DB tables are available (at this time).
DaveO
Not sure if youâre still on 10.2.100, but at some point on 10.2, Epicor introduced Epicor Data Discovery. The version that ships is free (might have to get your licensed updateâŚ). It basically does what youâre asking. It runs a BAQ and visualizes it for you, including drill down capability, sort by grids, and grouping.
#3 - You can have your group Visibility set as Hide by default. Then the user can open the group of the Parts they want to look at.
I believe this is what you were asking.
That is what Iâm trying but nothing happens when I run the report 
Thanks
Are you running as PDF or Excel?
Unfortunately I donât trust my users all that much 
PDF but after you asked I tried Excel and it works in that format. The videos Iâm watching looked like he was in PDF but this works (just have to retrain users to use Excel sometimes!)
Thanks
Cool.
I couldnât get it work in PDF, either.
Here is what I was referencing, an article I wrote, which I will share here in a âredacted to protect the innocentâ versionâŚ
Creating Bookmarks in a PDF using SSRS
PROBLEM DEFINITION
One of the neat features in the Crystal Report Viewer was that the navigation pane worked. It was well in tune with the document data and a user could easily navigate the document just by mousing as opposed to using a keyboarded full document search operation.
This style report preview was quite useful, as multiple users reported, for traversing a Job Traveler Report.
Job Traveler Report
Jobs, job operations, subassemblies, subassembly job operations.
Subreports: Raw Materials. Subassembly Components.
Many assembly numbers, operations, and parts.
Since the direction of Epicor now is to move away from Crystal Reports, we took the opportunity when reasonable to go ahead and convert many of the custom reports over to SSRS. The Job Traveler was one of those reports. Unfortunately, the out of the box SSRS report does not give you the right kind of information populated in the navigation pane of the resulting PDF document when using report preview.
This problem bridges into the area of âAccessibilityâ as I found out when researching solutions. âAccessibilityâ encourages us to always tag, caption, alt-text, and those kinds of things when doing our development work. It is worthwhile for many reasons.
Notice how the standard Job Traveler report just gives you Bookmarks pinned to all the Job Operations for each Assembly, and it is not really that useful.
PROPOSED SOLUTION
In my research I kept running across the concept of Tags in the PDF specification. In fact, Adobe Reader is supposed to automatically Tag a document when it is opened, but I could not find any evidence of this, except for the Property Yes/No this document is a Tagged PDF. I never saw Tags as part of the navigation pane. If you are using Acrobat Pro DC or something equivalent, there are features there to create Tagging, but in the case of an ERP system generating the PDFs for us, that is not a robust option.
Navigation Pane Bookmarks
Enter the Bookmark and this article on Stack Overflow:
Can I add navigation arrows to PDF output in SSRS / Report Builder 3.0?
As I mentioned in comments you can create a bookmark in each page. A bookmark can be added using the component DocumentMapLabel property almost all SSRS Report Items (Tablix, Textbox, Charts, etc) have.
If you donât have a title or a textbox at the very top of each page, add an empty textbox, be sure place them at the top of the page in order to each bookmark jumps to the beginning of the corresponding page.
Select the first textbox and press F4 to see the extended properties window, look for DocumentMapLabel and type Page 1.
In each page set the textbox DocumentMapLabel property to the corresponding page number.
When the report is exported to PDF, your PDF client shows the bookmark menu, containing a bookmark for each page. If you click on a bookmark it jumps to the related page.
So, if you take this concept and run with it, you should discover that many things beyond Page labels can be added here. For example, using Expressions, I added my own labels and incorporated them with field values to make the Raw Material subreport portion of data stand out. Like so:
=âMATL-â & Fields!MtlSeq.Value & â-â & Fields!PartNum.Value
Or like so:
=âASM-â & Fields!AssemblySeq.Value & â-OPER-â & Fields!OpCode.Value
This results in a PDF with additional Bookmarks like so:
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, tackle the challenges head on, always keep searching for solutions, always keep in mind it is only software, and there is always a way. Enjoy!