SSRS pre-printed form second page format issue - reporting-services

I've not come across anything like I am looking for so either I'm either not asking the right questions (for which I will apologize for re-asking a question) or it's not been asked.
I'm working on a report to print header information onto pre-printed carbon copy forms on a continuous form feed impact printer. The form is two pages and the header for the second page only contains part of the information that the header on the first page has.
I have the first page header working fine. I played with using rectangles and it was printing on target on every other page. The problem comes in when I try to print the page two header.
The way I am formatting the headers is that I have a single cell tablix with a rectangle in the cell. I've measured out where the 11 fields belong for page one of the form and placed them on the form. This all works correctly. Below that, I've inserted a second rectangle with the add page break before property checked. In that rectangle I have two of the fields that are repeated one just above the other (field 1 and field 2). Field 1 is in exactly the same spot as it is on page one. Field 2 is higher and to the left of where it is positioned on page one. The report body has no margins. Positioning is all done directly through the elements themselves. Field 1 sits about 1/16 to 1/8 inch lower than it does on page 1 even when position top is set to 0 (and there is no page margin). I can position field 2 exactly where I want it to be however. If I have multiple forms print out, all the page ones are perfect and page 2 field 2 is spot on but page 2 field 1 is always too low.
I tried separating the rectangles but was unable to connect the dataset to the second rectangle.
Is there a better way to do this? Is there a setting I'm missing that is adding padding to the second rectangle? Any help is appreciated.

Not quite the answer that I was looking for but it nearly fixed the problem. It turns out that the field itself had padding on it. I'm not sure how as I copied and pasted it from the first page but it moved it up to a acceptable position. It is still a bit low but close enough that the requester is happy with it.

Related

SSRS - Blank Pages (again...) even with respected settings

I know that the question was submitted a lot of times, but this is driving me mad.
I'm trying to make a landscape A4 report, printer friendly. As I could see in lots of threads before I tried to respect the fact that the body size must be inferior or equal to the physical page, including margins, and columns in the count.
Here are my document properties
Report:
Body:
I inserted a first rectangle with some contents, at that point, no extra blank page, here is the rectangle location :
Right after I inserted a second rectangle with same dimensions as previous one:
Both first pages are rendered correctly with the rectangle at its expected location, but I get a 3rd extra blank page...
ConsumeContainerWhiteSpace property is set to true, and this did not help...
Do you have any trick to get definitely rid of these blank pages ?
Thanks a lot !
EDIT : Just added the report designer view, as requested
Don't know how I didn't notice it before, but your body height is bigger than your page height defined in the report properties. If your report is supposed to generate two pages, that second page will have to add an extra 3 centimeters and cause that third page.
I finally managed to handle this the following way : I put my first rectangle 0,5cm under the header (with a forced pagebreak after) and if I use the same size of rectangle for everypage, ensuring that there's a 0,5 cm space between each rectangle, I can manage to display content on multiple pages, with rectangle bordel always located at the same position. Guess I should keep this method for all future reports :) Thanks a lot for your advices !

Report elements on left getting pushed down when tablix on the right side expands

I have a report with a tablix on the right side and several textboxes arranged in rows and columns on the left. While previewing the report, the tablix gets expanded with the separate values in them and because of which some of the text boxes are also getting pushed down leaving blanks spaces and making the report look unformatted.
I have attached the report format. Please let me know if you have any solution to this issue.
You need to place your report items in rectangles to stop them interacting with each other. Put your items on the left all into the same one and the table on the right into it's own.
Have you tried setting the Can Grow attribute to False or did you need it to expand? If so I would actually increase your Tablix size to the max it can to not push the text boxes and then set the property to Can Grow to false.
I think I know why rectangles didn't work for you. I have a similar report I am trying to create with the same format. I had the same problem you mentioned where white space appeared above my report objects, and the objects on the left still did not appear in the correct places.
What I found was that you need to create the rectangle first and then add objects into it. It appears that the above problem occurs when you try to place a rectangle on top of your report objects.
I know this is 4 years late, but I thought this might hopefully save someone some time.
Go to Report Properties to select columns number from 1 to 2 to see information side by side instead of going to next page.
Report Properties

SSRS - Adding empty cells under a tablix to fill empty spaces on the page (if any)

I work with ssrs with a dynamic row data in matrix/tablix. There is possibility when I have more than one page (say it two pages) where the data just fill half of the second page and leave a blank space below (half page blank space on the second page). How is the way to fill this blank space with empty rows? (whether rendering empty rows in the tablix, or inserting background image, or anything. I don't have any solution yet as it is dynamic data with many possibilities of the blank space size on the page)
Unfortunately there aren't any settings in the reporter that support this behavior. There are however several workarounds you could use to get the wanted result.
[1]
You could determine the amount of rows that fit on the first page and on the second page, just in case you have items above the
table on the first page. Before you send the datasource to the
reporter count the total rows and check if it exceeds the first page.
Then calculate the number of rows missing to fill an entire second
page (or third/fourth... if you ever get more data). Finally you add
empty rows/objects at the end of your datasource, which will of cource
cause the pages to be filled to the end.
As was pointed out before, this solution is only possible when working
with fixed row heights. If certain columns can have multi-line cells
then these could be checked as well and taken in account when
calculating the number of rows being displayed on the page. This makes
it slightly more complicated but is still a valid solution if you can
predict which columns might be troublesome.
[2]
A second solution would be to hide the table borders and place the table inside a rectangle that spans the maximum size of the
page. The borders of this rectangle can be used to display the table
outer borders and columns can be displayed by adding lines inside the
rectangle. This will cause the columns to fill the last page of the
report automatically. Unfortunately this isn't a solution to display
horizontal grid lines.
[3]
A third approach is adding an extra table directly below your table
with the same size of columns. Using the same method as from the first
solution you could fill the second table to represent the empty rows.
You'll probably have the same issue as with the first solution when
dealing with multi-line rows though.
I believe solution [1] and [3] will offer the most exact solution, if you're willing to do the math. If you don't want any horizontal lines then I suggest using approach [2].
Using an image to overlay the borders is of course another option but then you'll have the same issues when dealing with the multi-line rows. If you plan on working with fixed row heights, where you leave space for multi-line cells then this is becomes a valid approach but so does solutions [1] and [3].
Update:
If you only need the filled pages for printing you could make sure you add enough empty rows to fill at least the entire last page, these may go to a new page (1 new page, not 2... you can use a simple calculated guess for this) and exclude the last page when printing.

Access report "Can Grow" property needs to effect neighboring controls

I have a report with a bunch of controls in the Detail section.
I am working off a word document that was given to me as a sample and I recreated it in access almost perfectly. What I need now is a way to handle overflowing the text boxes. I have "Can Grow" enabled, but here is the real issue:
I have a fake table going on. Multiple text boxes arranged in a way that just doesn't work in a subform. Certain cells have red, green or yellow backgrounds while others are just plain white. When one of the text fields overflows, and "grows", the other text boxes in the same row stay the same size as before and it looks very very odd (703 twips vs 300). I would really just love for it to work as if it were a table in word/excel and the entire row would grow at once (all =703 twips), but seeing as how it isn't literally a "row" I just want a way to associate the height of these text boxes with each other.
Is anything like this possible? If I need to clarify anything just let me know, I hope I've given ample information.
In the design view of your report select all the textbox controls in the detail section and all the labels in the page header section. Right click on one of the textbox controls and select Layout -> Tabular. The controls and labels should now align with each other.
You've not set which version of Access you're using but this works in Access 2007.
Ok here we go. So I had a fake table, I needed it to have table borders around each text box and when one text box got taller than the others in the row, the borders would look totally wrong. So, what we have to do is literally draw on the report at runtime, which can be done in any view including print preview. This code must be placed in the Print event
'step one. find out which box in the row has the greatest height value.
'You can come across this information however you want.
'It will likely depend on what data goes in the boxes.
'For the sake of the answer length we will skip that actual code
'step two. Take measurements and store them in variables.
'You will need a start point, and an end point in standard (x1,y1),(x2,y2) form.
Dim t As Integer 'top
Dim l As Integer 'left
Dim b As Integer 'bottom
'step three. Use these measurements and draw your lines.
'Try to use looping if your naming and report layout work will allow it.
Me.Line (l, t)-(l, b), RGB(0, 0, 0)
' (x1,y1)(x2,y2),pick a color
'We just drew a line straight down the length of the control
'If you plan ahead, and place a line on the report permanently on top of the first row
'and below every row, you will only need to draw vertical lines.
'The lines below each row will be pushed down by the tallest control
I hope this helps. I had no idea this stuff existed before at all. Here is the MSDN info about it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa221362%28v=office.11%29.aspx
OK...
1 - Go into Design view of your report
2 - Select ALL the textbox controls in the detail section that you want to be table like and ALL grow if any one grows.
3 - Right click on one of the selected textbox controls and select Layout -> Tabular.... but... now... after you have your textbox row controls as a tabular layout... You must do one thing more...
4 - Inside your reports FORMAT TAB properties... Set ALL PADDING properties to 0.00... 0.00 for Top Padding, 0.00 Right Padding, 0.00 Left Padding and 0.00 Bottom Padding. (default is usually around 0.0208)
5 - Please note that changing your textboxes to a Tabular Layout kinda throws your textboxes to the right (at least for me) so you may need to re-adjust them so they are aligned with your Page Header textboxes again (if you have any that you might be using to header name your table like columns).
6 - Make sure ALL SPACE is removed in the detail area by having the bottom bar (page or report footer) snugly up against the bottom of your Tabular Textbox Layout and also ditto with the upper detail bar (page or report header).
7 - Now when you look your report in print preview with max 200% or more zoom you WILL still see very very minor spaces between your cells in your layout but when you actually print they will be almost unnoticeable unless you take out a magnifying lens.
I found a solution for my situation but I would like to have a better one...
In my case, a TextBox at the left side is describing the content of 1 to 3 pictures on the right side. The TextBox, if enlarging more than the height of the first picture, would shift pictures 2 and 3 down, in spite of a properly designed Top-Attribute in the picture controls.
My solution: I put the height attribute of the text box to 15cm (e.g 2 Inch) and enable it as shrinkable.
However, strange, but this helps for positioning the Pictures at its desired Top-Locations... :-) as well as minimizing the horizontal space used.

How to keep List contents on the first page? (SSRS 2005 - PDF Export)

I've got the following report setup:
1. Letterhead (not in the header, since i only want it on the first page)
2. List control with some data
when i export the report to PDF, and the contents of the List are less that one full page - my letterhead is displayed on the first page (the rest of the page is empty) and the List content gets moved to the second page.
if the List grows over 1 page - reports is showing up just fine (Letterhead and portion of the list on the first page - the rest on the second page)
It looks like it tries to keep the list on 1 page as long as its contents fit on the page - but when you add the letterhead to the contents it overflows the page, and the list gets bumped down to the next page.
Is there any way to keep the list on the first page regardless of its size.
Putting the letterhead in the list is my last resort, I'd like to hear some other solutions.
uploaded a sample .rdl to illustrate the problem
got rid of the list for simplicity, the problem seems to be with a textbox wanting to show up on 1 page
p.s. see this question for more details
What is the source of your text? Is it coming from a dataset? If so, Add a paragraph id in it, set your table to group on the paragraph id and show only the group header. In the group, add a bottom padding value of say 5. The table will handle the paragraph breaks for you, and if it grows more the a page it will handle it for you. Make sure that keep together is set to false. The paragraph id will be used to sort the dataset by id ascending.
sorry I didn't notice your comment at the end. The only other thing that i can think of is to shift your list up closer to the header and eliminate all empty space at the end. Also, make sure the KeepTogether option in the list is set to false. This way it will break up your list rather than move it to the next page.
you can put both the letterhead and the list inside a rectangle so they are always grouped together.
Reporting services also tries to keep the relative spaces you have in the designer, so if you list is aligned to the bottom of the page and there is a space form the header; it will keep the space on top and align everything to the bottom of the page.