In
our project, we needed to create SQL Server Reporting Service reports
for users to view tabular data and graphs. We decided
using Report Builder 3.0 to build the report templates.
On 2008 when I worked on another project, we had a requirement to
support reports. At that time, I wrote an article to compare
Crystal Reports, Report Designer in Visual
Studio, and Report Designer in SQL Server. I used Report
Designer in Visual Studio in that project.
The Report Builder tool is effective and fun, but sometimes it's
annoying, so occasionally I would rather directly open the rdl
file to modify the XML syntax.
Problem
One
of our reports has the following requirement. First, it
should be
grouped under Product. Every product will have a table to
show
its related information. The table has two different
formats
depending on the product type. What I did was to drag a
table,
add a group, and inside the group, add 2 rows. Then I added
one
tables to each row, and the row visibility would be decided by the
product type.
It worked fine and showed the result users
want. However, I noticed that the product name always showed
in a
separate page if the details table for that product crossed over one
page. Report Builder has some properties such as KeepTogether
which will push the content to a new page if they cannot be showed in
one page. This time we did want the details table to be in
the
same page as the product name even it could not fit into one page. We didn't want a silly empty page only having the product
name
showed.
Solution
First
and obviously, we thought it should be a easy task and the
properties of the report should do the trick. We tried
different properties such as KeepTogether, PageBreak, Group Properties,
and changed them
for both the parent table and children table, but neither of
them
worked.
I searched around and couldn't find a good solution or anything which
claims this is a known issue. I did get this
and this
stating sub report has this issue but it seems already fixed at some
point.
My
final solution is totally out of my expectation. I just
changed
the parent tablix from a table to a list and the problem was resolved. Lists give you more freedom to control the layout, and
probably
have less restriction. In the list, I can easily put 2 tables
anywhere and control the visibility of them.
Second Thoughts
I
was curious about what is different between a table and a
list,
and why they have different behaviors. So I created 2 new
reports
and put a list and a table to them respectively, and I used Beyond
Compare to compare them. There was really not much difference. As
we know, both table and list are called Tablix in the .rdl XML file. The only significant difference is inside the TablixCell,
list
puts a Rectangle, whereas table puts a Textbox. So I guess
that
the behavioral difference of List and Table is caused by the design
feature of Rectangle and Textbox. KeepTogether probably is
not
working on a textbox. In the other hand, Rectangle is a loose layout
control, and provides more freedom to end users.
