When browsing a cube using Excel 2007, you can drillthrough the measures to display up to 1000 rows of the transaction level source data.

I often get asked whether this limit of 1000 rows is configurable – well the good news is yes it is.

There is an option in the actions tab of the BIDS cube designer which allows you to specify the maximum rows, but helpfully this is ignored by Excel. Instead, you have to set it in Excel when you create a pivot.

Just click “Options” on the “PivotTable Tools” ribon, then in the “Change Data Source” dropdown click on “Connection Properties“. In this screen, just change the “Maximum number of records to retrieve” property.

There isn’t yet a built-in facility within Reporting Services to open a report link (i.e. a drillthrough report) in a new browser window or tab, however it isn’t too tricky to get this to work using a bit of javascript.

javascript:void(window.open(Destination,’_blank’))

My preferred method is to wrap this up into a custom code function such as

Function OpenURL(ByVal URL As String) As String
Return “javascript:void(window.open(‘” & URL & “‘,’_blank’))”
End Function

In your report, you can then just set the navigation property to jump to a URL of a website:

=Code.OpenURL(“http://www.purplefrogsystems.com“)

Or to the path of a the drillthrough report:

=Code.OpenURL(“http://[Your Server]/ReportServer?/Folder/ReportName&rs:Command=Render”)

If you have parameters that you need to pass in, you can add these into the URL either fixed or dynamic:

=Code.OpenURL(“http://[Your Server]/ReportServer?/Folder/ReportName&rs:Command=Render &MyFirstParam=Value1&MySecondParam=” & Fields!MyField.Value)

Please note that this will not work in the BIDS development environment, it will only work once you have deployed the report to the Report Server.