Lisa Nicholls
Ah! The thread I sent you to will not help you because you really *are* using a custom report item, not doing custom report processing (I really wasn't sure before and very few people are doing the former <s>).
>> I am just started with c# (former delphi & vb)
It really is important to realize that you should be able to do this in whatever language you want, and that should include delphi.net <g>, but FWIW I think they test most everything of this nature in c# first <g>.
First, where is the vb sample that you are working from and trying to emulate I think there was a custom report item in RS 2000 but it changed a lot so it's important to make sure you're not using an old sample, regardless of language.
Now, I have two mostly-separate things to tell you <s>:
1. I think the best way to do what you want to do is to use a custom property to hold the report parameters item you want.
I assume that you have been working from either the Polygons CRI sample or maybe the article by Teo Lachev in MSDN that is based on the Polygons sample That's how I got started. You will see that the Polygons item has a custom property like this:
<CustomProperty>
<Name>polyPI</Name>
<Value>=Parameters!DPI.Value</Value>
</CustomProperty>
... so clearly it is one way to get access to the parameters. You will see other custom properties that are expressions basd on data elements in the report.
2. What you said about "so multiple report items can use it" happens to touch on a subject very near and dear to my heart with regard to custom report items. <s> I have posted something about what I have been working on here http://spacefold.com/articles/XMLRSDocs.aspx, but what you can't see in what I've written so far is the design choices that I made as a result of what a custom report item can and cannot do.
We can take this conversation off-line or off-forum if you like and I can be more specific. Basically as you'll see in what I've written already it is quite important in my scenario that one custom report item have some bearing on the rest of the report but it is not something that was envisioned by MS. In fact, I thought originally that I wanted to work solely on the Report level rather than using a customreportitem at all for what I wanted to do -- but this turned out to have its own difficulties. I haven't had a chance to write about this yet.
>L<