Easy way to pass down all parameters to Pentaho subreports

At yesterday’s Pentaho London User Group (PLUG) meetup I discussed with Thomas Morgner again the topic sub-reports. For a long time I’ve tried to explain that sub-reports are a concept that shouldn’t be exposed to the actual report designer. We should all just start with a blank canvas (with no bands) and add objects (tables, crosstabs, charts, etc) and then link these objects to the data sources (frankly quite similar to how it is done in some other report designers or CDE). And parameters should just be available everywhere without having to map them to the specific objects.

Anyways, during this discussion Thomas mentioned that there is actually no need to specify all the parameters in the parameter mapping dialog in the subreport. You can just add one mapping with stars (*) in it and all parameters will be passed down automatically to the subreport. Frankly, I was puzzled and astound about this … I remembered the days when I was working on monster reports with 30 or 40 subreports and all the time had to define 17 or so parameters for each of them. Why this was not documented anywhere, I was quite wondering. Needless to say that this is a real time safer!

My next question was then, why this was not the default behaviour? If I don’t specify any parameter mappings, PRD should just pass down all parameters by default. So, I just created this JIRA case therefore and we all hope that this will be implemented as soon as possible. Please vote for it!

So excited as I was about these news, this morning I had to quickly test this approach. Here the mapping in the subreport:

Then I just output the values in the details band of the sub-report:

And here is how the preview looks:

Now that was easy! Thanks Thomas!