SSRS report throws an error that says a parameter doesn’t exist when the report designer clearly shows the parameter exists

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Richard

The order in which the parameters appear in the BIDS Report Data tab can be the difference between your report executing and it failing. Failure to pay attention to this will give you very mysterious error messages!

"The Value expression for the query parameter PARAMNAME contains and error:The expression that references the parameter PARAMNAME does not exist in the parameters collection. Letters in the names of parameters must have the correct case"

It may be visible at design time but not come into scope when the particular expression is evaluated!

You can force the order of the parameters by going into the XML code and adjusting as needed.

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15 Responses to SSRS report throws an error that says a parameter doesn’t exist when the report designer clearly shows the parameter exists

  1. Nicholas says:
    January 31, 2013 at 7:02 pm

    Thank you! I was getting very frustrated with SSRS. The parameter order was my problem.

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  2. Jimbo Jones says:
    July 31, 2014 at 10:55 pm

    Wow. This was gold. Was tearing my hair out and this solved my issue. Just find the parameter section and move the parameter with issue to the top! thanks,

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  3. Graeme says:
    August 21, 2014 at 5:50 am

    Thank you for this – very helpful!

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    • Richard says:
      August 21, 2014 at 6:10 am

      Thanks for the encouragement! SSRS can be so simple in so many ways but there are some real gotchas. I’m working through a pesky sorting issue now. I might post about that, but I also have a post planned about E/R Studio. Anyway, not sure when I’d get to either. We’ll see.

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  4. sinma says:
    October 13, 2014 at 7:33 am

    You are absolutely right . Thank you very much for your input.

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  5. ajitha m k says:
    November 2, 2015 at 1:44 am

    This helped, Thanks.

    Liked by 1 person

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  6. RJ Gilmore says:
    February 10, 2017 at 1:05 pm

    I know this is my problem, too, but have tried everything in the XML to arrange the order and nothing is working. Do I change the data sent parm order to match the parms in the SSRS parm list or what? I have 12 data sets and 5 totals parms which are not all used in each data set. Any suggestions would be hlp

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    • Richard says:
      February 13, 2017 at 10:47 am

      Hmm… This is a tough one, RJ. Did you try matching the order in each list? What happened when you did that? Sadly, this is something you may just have to play with. Try and get your head into the interpreter and think about the order it needs the parameters and put them into that order. If that doesn’t work, let me know. I’ll be mulling over what else might work.

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  7. Chuck as Salerno says:
    October 20, 2020 at 6:52 am

    I understand the order of parameters but need to be able to test whether a parameter has been established or not. I’ve tried to use IIF( IsNothing(Parameters!Param1.Value) but still errors out with “The expression references the paramter ‘Param1″ which does not exist” is there another test?

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  8. Andrew Partridge says:
    November 3, 2021 at 11:31 pm

    I just had this very problem again (it pops up from time to time at just long enough intervals that it throws me every time). This time the parameter in question is an internal parameter with a default value that is a fixed string – no dependencies. I simply dragged it from the bottom of the parameter grid to near the top and the error vanished.

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