SSRS Report and Subreport Debugging Issues Debugged! pt 2

·        CSS Stylesheet Reporting: There are apparently no built in controls or options for doing faster formatting and CSS imitation formatting. Use this custom code as a template.

o   Function StyleColor(ByVal Style As String) As String

          Select Case UCase(Style)

            Case "HEADER"

                Return "LightBlue"

            Case "FOOTER"

                Return "SkyBlue"

            Case "MAINTITLE"

                Return "Purple"

            Case "SUBTITLE"

                Return "DarkBlue"

            Case Else

                Return "White"

        End Select

    End Function

·        Merging Cells: For some reason, SSRS doesn’t want you to be able to merge cells vertically. No clue why the designers did it this way, as it really impedes design.

·        Table Visibility: In the Text Box Properties, select Visibility. You can choose to show/hide the table on runtime, or when a condition is met. You can also configure this to individual columns and rows.

·        Control whether certain groups are shown for the user at runtime: Say your user doesn’t want to see certain groups. Make a parameter as a Boolean and have them choose obviously the True or False at runtime. Next, set each Group you want to show/hide based on the bool value’s visibility to iif(Parameter) = False.

·        Repeating a Column Header on additional pages: Select the cells you wish this to happen to, and go to the Properties box on the bottom right corner of the screen. KeepWithGroup should be set to After and RepeatOnNewPage should be set to True.

·        Hyperlinks: Text Box Properties à Action. In here, you can enable the text/cell as a hyperlink to a webpage, a bookmark, or a separate report.

·        Checkboxes: SSRS doesn’t support clickable checkboxes, for some reason. However, you can simply type one in, use a wingdings font, or import a checkbox image. None of these are particularly pleasing, but I’ve found just a simple [ ] works.

o   Note: The Report Server distorts your custom formatting slightly, therefore, a box might only be so big, or isn’t centered correctly. In this case, an image might be best.

o   Note: =iif(Fields!BookingMade.Value = "1",chr(0254),"o") creates a wingdings checkbox while using the Wingdings font in that cell/text box. ((From http://notethat.blogspot.com/2007/10/reporting-services-tips-tricks-and.html ))