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rwheeler23Flag for United States of America

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ssrs data field in header

I have a SSRS2005 report and one of the datasets has two data elements in it. The first is a report parameter and the second is a comment. This comment repeats for all of the report parameters. What I want to do is have this comment appear in the header. When I try using the 'First' directive SSRS tells me that fields cannot be in the header or footer. Is there any way to get around this restriction?
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Howard Cantrell
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The data has to be in the main body of the report. So the next step is to hide (if you do not want to see it) the textbox that has the data that you want in the header and then in the header textbox use this type of code.
=ReportItems!MytextBoxName.Value
MytextBoxName is the name of the textbox that has the hide data in it.
The hidden textbox code will be something like:  =Fields!Comments.Value
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ReportItems!MytextBoxName.Value
It does not appear to know what the directive ReportItems is. Is this something that works in SSRS 2008?
It works in 2005 I think it would work in 2008
Nevermind, I see that it is case sensitive. However, this is the text field I placed in the body. Even though I know that bchcomnt has a value, it always comes back blank.

=First(Fields!bchcomnt.Value, "BatchNumber")

This is drinving me nuts. I just deployed the report and there is the comment. When I preview it under BIDS I do not see the comment.
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Howard Cantrell
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Oh yea I forgot in 2005 you do not need to use the word  ---- First       in your code. only in 2008.
If you use First in 2005 you will only get the first record and thats all. If the record is empty you will never see any data.
Well I will live with in not appearing in BIDS because all the users will see is what appears in their browser. This comment, if it exists, is part of a batch in which all the transactions belong. So all I need is to see the first one. My report is set to give them a lookup by batch ID and that dataset contains the batch comment. Once they choose the batch, all the transactions in that batch are included on the report. I used the same technique for four other reports and the comment appears in all four of them in BIDS. It is just the first version where I do not see it in BIDS.

Thanks for all your help!