We’ve had an annoying problem with a couple of our SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services (SSRS) reports lately. Two of our reports have a lot of parameters, over twenty each. When a user picked a value from a drop down to use for one of the many parameters we have, the entire report would flicker and slowly repaint. Very annoying and time consuming. Further it didn’t seem to matter if the report ran in the report manager, or hosted in a web page report viewer control.
We worked with this, and after several searches I finally found one article on the web which told us what our problem was.
http://sqlreportingservices.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!17F39A64B3FF4C5C!238.entry
The article does a good job of explaining the issue and how to fix it; I wanted to rebroadcast it to help bring attention to it. The summary version: if you have hard coded default values or expressions for the parameters for some reason SSRS will sometimes flicker when the user selects something from the list.
Instead, the answer is to use a query to supply the default value. Fortunately SSRS makes it easy, just create a dataset with something like:
SELECT ‘Default Value’ as TheDefaultValue
When we took our report and replaced all the hard coded defaults (and we had a lot) with queries to supply the defaults our flicker / redraw / repaint issue went away.
Again, read the linked post for a thorough understanding. My goal here is to spread the word; it took me a lot of search and wading through pages of posts to find ONE that had my answer. I thought if I had that much problem finding it others may too.
Arcane Code 
The page refresh in my case was caused by date fields. I have 7 parameters and the two that were above my date range fields would cause the flicker, the ones below did not. So, in my case I was just able to move the start date and end date parameters to the top and have the other dropdown/hard coded/etc. parameters below. Just another option.
Good info, thanks!
It is doing somewhat the same thing in my case, but it does that when I either do a sort on the columns or open a grouped data, toggle functionality. I dont have any default values set for my parameters, but still the flicker, and refresh is happening, ending up affecting the width and theheight of the table.
Any help on this will be appreciated.
Thanks
-Sarah
This article was really good and useful. It resolved the screen flickering problem that I was having on my reports upon paramteres selection. Thank you very much,
There will be flickering issues when u have parameters with non-queried Available values …. just try the using a dataset to fill the parameters …. I had such an issue and solved it by having a dataset to populate the parameter …
Hope it helps …
do not work in sharepoint integrated mode and I cannot put queried values for available values because it is date time and the user must choose the period. any idea ?
I HAVE A DRILL DOWN GROUP WHICH WHEN EXPANDED REFRESHES THE ENTIRE REPORT SO IT IS TAKING A long time