In many reports, the data you select is hard-coded at design time. Some reports, however, require the ability to display a different set of data based on run time criteria, such as user login or the data source that a report user selects.

As described in Understanding data sources, the data source editor provides a feature called property binding to support the setting of connection properties at run time. Similarly, the data set editor provides the property binding feature to support the selection of data at run time.

Figure 2‑5 shows the Property Binding page for a JDBC data set. The Query Text property is where you specify an expression that determines at run time what data to select. The Query Text property is also available to other types of data sets.