The Description property field of an SSRS report accepts a text description that appears when a user clicks the "..." in the upper right corner of the deployed report's tile displayed on the report server. What's the exact limit on the number of characters that can be placed in the Description property? Trial & error suggests it's about 425 characters, but I'd like to know exactly. It's frustrating that you can [apparently] put as many characters as you like in the Description property field without getting a warning until you deploy the report, at which point you may get a "The Description field has a value that is not valid" message. I chased my tail for a while trying to figure out if I had put an illegal character the Description property field, until I realized that the message was probably telling me that I had exceeded the character limit--but what's the actual limit?
512
The Description field has a length of 512 characters in the Catalog table of ReportServer but the SSRS property will let you enter any number of characters without error.
When A report is deployed to a report server with more than 512 characters, it gives an error:
The Description field has a value that is not valid.
On the other hand, if you change the Description Property and deploy the report over a current report, the Description field IS NOT UPDATED and it does deploy.
Related
In a text box I am using an expression for a goto report action based on a parameter. A report will be openend based on the value of the parameter:
iif(Parameters!Par_Sub.Value = "Werkgever.Bedrijf",
"reportsubtwo.rdl",
nothing
)
In preview however I get the following message:
the Drillthrough Report Name for the text box is not valid. Item names cannot contain the following reserved characters ;?:#&=+$,*<>|". (rsInvalidReportNameCharacters)
What could be wrong? The report reportsubtwo exists and does not contain any special characters, I am running into a dead end obviously.
I have found the solution, the = character before the IIF statement is missing,
=iif(Parameters!Par_Sub.Value = "Werkgever.Bedrijf", "reportsubtwo.rdl", nothing )
is the right syntax. Curiously there was no syntax error message displayed after completing the goto report action, but this vague message about the report name containing reserverd characters during previewing the report.
I have what seems to be a common issue but the specifics are a bit different than other questions available. Working in a MS Access 2016 database on Windows 10.
I have a query performing a UDP function Coalesce which combines Long Text from multiple records into a single String. The query does not appear to be limited in size at all - I can view the correct output of hundreds of characters.
However when i try to display this in a report, in a text box with Can Grow, only the first 255 characters are visible. (Text box is growing correctly)
There is no formatting at all set to this text box, and it is set to Plain Text (so it can shrink, which apparently Rich Text cannot do. Also Rich text has the same problem)
Many solutions center around getting the query to return more than 255 characters (Why a Long Text field is returning only 255 characters in a MS ACCESS 2013 query?) - I do not have this problem. The query is ok.
Many solutions center around a record source from a table of type Short Text, or a query from a Short Text field (Access report field truncating at 255 characters). This is also not my problem since a) the original source field is long text, it is processed through a UDP which outputs a String type, and the query result is >255 characters.
Help!
If the report RecordSource is a query that references the query with the concatenation, you may encounter the bug described by Allen Browne's ConcatRelated function article http://allenbrowne.com/func-concat.html where he offers possible solution.
However, the function can be called from a textbox or in another VBA procedure. Options to try so results are not passed query to query:
reference query object with the concatenation by name directly as RecordSource
construct SQL statement with the concatenation function directly in RecordSource
call concatenation function directly in textbox
How can I limit the number of characters a user can type for a parameter in SSRS?
For example, if the Data Type is set to TEXT, how to limit the user to type only 6 characters after Default value of "CL/" OR limit to total of 9 characters.
Unfortunately you can't perform validation as people write values, you can only handle them when the report is run. You can however use Code behind the report to perform some validation on your Parameters at run-time. Based on the result of this you can then either display the required data to instead return an error message.
To insert some code behind you right click the area around the report, Choose Report Properties, then Code.
Enter something like this into the code panel
Function Validate(param) as Boolean
If len(cstr(param)) <= 9 Then
Return"True"
Else
Return "False"
End if
End Function
You can then refer to the result of this from a text box that displays an error as follows
Right click the text box and set the visibility to be
=iif(Code.Validate(Parameters!myInput.Value) = True, True, False)
Then if you enter a string of 9 or fewer characters you will get an error that you can use to inform the user of the proper format of your desired input string.
Instead of just making text boxes visible/invisible, you could also apply this to rectangles that store your report information. Also, you can use visual basic coding to alter the Code behind to perform more complicated parameter validation to check for you "CLI" string for example.
I hope this helps, let me know if you require further help.
Is there a way to set the report description property from either an expression or from the code? I need it to contain some reference numbers that change depending on the parameters entered. I'm going around in circles trying to find out how to do this.
I developed an RDL file with a parameter set to be the field value, named "Client", of one of my datasets. I use this parameter value in the page footer because this was the only way I could get Client to appear correctly in the footer. The other methods Client value did not always appear correctly.
Here is what this parameter properties look like:
So this works if there is data, however, if there are no records in rpt_rd_RecreationTherapy, then I get the following error:
and in my page footer, I have a text box set to the following:
=iif(isnothing(Parameters!new_youth.Value),"",Parameters!new_youth.Value)
Yes, I checked "allow blank value" to my parameter configuration
Jeroen is probably correct. I would access the Reports, Parameter setting using Report Manager and update it to match the BIDS setting.