Reports Drill Down

When developing reports, I have  usually would have to develop summary and detail reports. On the summary report I would have to have hyperlinks for certain data points to drill down in the detail of the data. For the drill down of reports I tend to use the Javascript:windows.open function. I usually will have a function created which would build build the detail report path along with the parameters that is required for the detailed report. I ran into a situation where when i clicked on a data point to open the detailed report, i kept getting an error with the link which i was trying to build to open the detailed report. I investigated the issue, the function, the windows.open syntax everything looked fine. I did not get any errors while trying to deploy the report, it was taking a long time to fix the issue. Then i started to look at the parameter values that were being passed, then my colleague who was working with me on the report stumbled into the issue. The problem was that there was data for one of the parameters which had a + sign embedded in it. This caused HTML to think of it as a concatenation character, which was throwing off the report path. The source of data for this parameter was fixed, the + was removed, the drill down started to work fine. While sourcing the data it is important to profile the data and scrub it, remove any unwanted special characters in the data and keep the data clean. In a nutshell Data Validation and integrity is very important otherwise one would never know where problems might arise.