SSRS 3D Horizontal Stacked Bar Chart Offset and Depth Properties - reporting-services

I am using SSRS (on top of SQL Server 2014). I am making a 3D horizontal stacked bar chart, but there are some display properties that I cannot figure out, despite all information available.
I Am wondering how/if the two measures in the chart above, a & b, can be set:
(a) The depth of the bar chart. Can I make this smaller? I want a much narrower bar.
(b) The offset of the chart from the axis. Is there a way to make the bar hug right up against the axis? Maybe I'm the only one, but when I look at the right extreme of the bar,I have trouble telling how close it falls to the 300 line due to this unnecessary offset.
Furthermore, does SSRS allow me to control things like the color rendering of the chart? Here is an example from another BI reporting tool:
This one has black outlines around all of the bars. Is SSRS capable of this? Mostly, I am just wondering if SSRS can make a chart that looks more like the latter.

The first two can be easily changed.
To set the bar width and border colour, click on one of the bars then hit F4 to bring up the properties pane.
In the properties, expand Custom Attributes and set the point width to something smaller, say 0.2 and set the border colour and style to your choosing.
Here's a screen-grab of the properties to give a nice garish red border and smaller bars.
To set the bars against the base, go to the horizontal (or vertical if you want to change this too) axis properties and set Side Margins to Disabled.
This gives this output...

Related

SSRS barchart label position

I'm going nuts trying to control the label position for a barchart. I want the labels to be above the bars and it mostly works. For a large dataset, a couple of bars have the label inside the bar and the rest are all above. For a smaller dataset, the labels all are above. I can't find ANY combination of properties that work consistently.
Click on the series in your chart then on the right side where the properties are under Labels -> Position -> Change to Top.

Put bars inside of each other in SSRS, but not stacked

In SSRS in a bar chart, in order to save space I would like to put two bars inside of each other (or behind if you want to say so, but not stacked). How is that possible?
See example image.
Sample image
I believe the trick is to create a standard vertical column chart, then change the bigger bar's series to a range column chart. Then change the 'point width' attribute of each series to be different, so one bar fits in the other.

How to make objects inside a rectangle NOT move in SSRS?

I have a rectangle and its background image is a screenshot of a form.
I have placed many Gauge Panels on this rectangle where check marks need to be.
Based on certain logic, the Gauge Panel will be visible or not.
The problem is that if all Gauge Panels on the left side are hidden, it moves all the Gauge Panels on the right side.
Here's a screenshot during design mode:
And here's when I run it:
I'm assuming it has moved because there was no visible "Yes" check mark.
How should I go about making sure these panels are FIXED inside the rectangle?
EDIT -
I tried putting the items inside rectangles and I'm running into the same problem:
Place your gauges inside fixed rectangles so even when they're not visible, their container rectangles will still take up space in your report on the left side and not interfere with the checks on the right hand side.
My general rule of thumb when trying to do fixed layouts in SSRS is use a lot of rectangles, as they are rendered as absolute DIVs and therefore bend to your whim a bit more in terms of heights, widths, and positioning.

Report items affecting each others positions in SSRS 2008

I'm having trouble with some report items changing other items' positions when they are conditionally hidden.
I've been using Reporting Services 2000 for printing item price labels as PDFs, with the report consisting of a single table with a single cell for each item. The data fields and other items on the label are all placed inside a single rectangle. Because of the very specific layout required, some of the report items overlap in the designer in order to position correctly on the rendered PDF.
This has worked fine for several years, until we upgraded to SSRS 2008 and I had to migrate the report to the new version.
Now, suddenly, when certain items on the report are hidden (by an expression in the Hidden-property), certain other items shift their positions. In some cases, even the containing rectangle is resized.
After quite a bit of googling, I've come to the understanding that SSRS 2008 attempts to maintain the relative spacing between report items, so that if an item to the left of another one changes in size, the item to the right is adjusted accordingly.
Apparently, hiding an item equates to changing its size to zero, and so the item next to it is shifted left to fill the gap.
However, I do not want this behavior, since all items should stay in their predefined positions regardless of others.
So, does anyone know of a way to "fix" report item positions, so that they are not affected by hiding other items?
I've tried placing the items inside separate rectangles so as to group them, in the hope that only items inside the same rectangle can affect each other, but this does not seem to help.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
In the side by side example, you can place the control that may be hidden into a rectangle big enough to hold both; but then put the other control that must stay in a fixed position BEHIND the rectangle (i.e. the parent of this control is the report rather than the rectangle).
If that's not enough, and the hidden and non-hidden items use the same dataset, you could (shudder) use a giant tablix control with a grouping of =1 and the right number of rows and columns to control the layout (because you can insert rectangles inside).
Some other tricks are to set the color/backgroundcolor properties to white (though in some rendering formats you can click and drag to highlight and still read what was there)... alternately you can go so far as to make the contents of controls all expression based, so as not to produce anything if a condition is met, and so it's basically invisible.
Another approach: create rectangles containing the fields you want to hide, then put a WHITE line across the entire bottom (or top) of the rectangle. This keeps the rectangle the same size even if the fields within it are hidden. A rectangle will shrink if the fields within it shrink, but the line spanning the entire rectangle prevents this from happening.
Not sure if this will help anyone else as it's a fairly specific requirement but it solved my variant of the OPs issue so here goes. I was designing an SSRS report to print labels (in my case the Avery 5164) and the users wanted to pick which labels on the sheet they would print because they may have already used one or two labels from a page. Because the positioning of the printed labels is important I needed them to stay in place even if the labels above them on the sheet were hidden. My solution was to create empty rectangles of the same size as the label and lay them directly on top of the existing rectangles. Even if I hide two, three, four, etc... labels, the rest will stay put.
Just draw a Rectangle, and slightly overlay the Objects with the Conditional Hidden expression with the position of your new empty Rectangle. Objects out to the right will be held in place by the Rectangle. No background colors or anything, just a Rectangle. Works vertically like if you have an address block and you want objects underneath the address lines to stay put. Like so...
enter image description here

Reporting services right item alignment

Is there a way to make items right aligned, say with the page or with some other item in a report, using reporting services 2008 ? Right now, I'm sort of emulating this behaviour by
shifting items to the right manually so that they look right aligned, however, when there's an item with a dynamic width (e.g. a tablix with data ir the horizontal direction), obviously, this approach fails. What is the correct way to do this ?
Unfortunately their is no horizontal align property available in the RDL spec (there is vertical align and text align), so there is no best way to do it.
You can employ some tricks to get the visual effects closer or perfect (textboxes work perfectly, tablix's are tougher and depend on a number of their settings):
- Place the right edge where you want it and drag the left edge to the maximum size you want to cater for, set the text align property to right, Set CanGrow to false (on a tablix you need to do this on the columns itself, where on textbox it is available directly): What this will do is allow for the text to appear right aligned correctly with growth handled and no export issues.
- Another trick is to place your elements in a rectangle which can help constrain it.
These options will work fine with dynamically generated RDL's, or setting in BIDS or Report Builder, as should all options, as it is the RDL which is the limiting factor not the tool/method which creates it.
Place the header and footer text-boxes on the right side of the report area away from sub-report alignment to bring them on RIGHT side in sub-report.