I am investigating SSRS 2005 as a possible reporting solution for a client and one of my requirements is to print cheques. Is the only way to do this to create a report in SSRS with the dimensions of the cheque with the data fields positioned properly or is there a better way of doing this? I have googled this problem but I am getting a lot of results for 'checkboxes', 'checking SSRS', and so on so that has been no help.
Thanks!
Yes, this could be done, and it would probably work pretty well. But SSRS isn't an ideal answer: printing from a web report is subject to the differences in browsers and their page setups & margins. Generating a .pdf and then printing seems like more steps than desirable.
If you decide to go ahead with this, use Rectangles: they try to hold their positions, even when the size of contents change. Also, set the CanGrow property to False everywhere.
Related
I need help figuring out how to setup report in SSRS to be viewed in HTML and PDF Outputs, within a single .rdl.
Thanks
This is a pretty broad question. If you have specific issues then you should ask a question about those issues. You will most likely see down-votes or votes to close this question because of this. Don't feel that people are not willing to help, they are, bit StackOverflow is kept clean by closing questions that don't conform to SO standards laid out here https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
Anyway....
Generally speaking, if you build a report, in most cases, you can export it to PDF without any real issues.
However, not all renderers support all circumstances so you might need to lookup the differences between the default HTML renderer and the PDF renderer. It's usually the following that cause issues.
Custom Fonts
Overlapping objects such as having text over an image
Page size and margins
Resolution of any images you might want to use in the report.
There will be others too that I can't think of but I suggest you build the report step by step and test each significant bit of work by exporting to PDF and checking the results.
As you come across problems that you cannot resolve, you can come back here and post questions about those specific issues.
There's lots of answers as to "why is this happening", or "what to look for"... but... there isn't a way to just suppress blank pages if there's data being rendered on them? No workaround other than tweaking things for hours to get it to not create blank pages? I have a report that has a matrix with dynamic content in it, and I get a blank page every other page regardless of how much I tweak the dimensions of the report... but it needs to grow with more data.
At the risk of sounding like a rant, it's difficult for me to believe, from a usability standpoint, that there is no mechanism to just suppress pages with no rendered data on them, but it seems like that is the case. If so, is there a "hack" that will allow me to suppress these pages, maybe after rendering? Or to truncate rendered data that goes outside of the dimensions of the page instead of putting it on another page? I am not a report designer by trade, and spending 10+ hours on this silly thing is seriously frustrating.
I found that if I set the report's ConsumeContainerWhiteSpace property to True, this problem went away:
I was poking around the internet and was curious if anyone on StackOverflow has ever managed to successfully bind a SubReport to a tooltip. I kind of was hearing multiple answers online. The most common assertion is that you cannot because tooltips only take expressions and cannot relate. Another assertion is that you can add custom code, which I have only done in labs, to get it to an expression that can then be used.
One of the things I wish SSRS would do out of the box would be to 'pop-out' drill down reports. Due to intense operations I understand you can't relate a lot of data but for just simple grids of details this would be fine.
So far I have been able to either set up subreports to drill to other pages or I found a blog where someone managed to use JavaScript to present the subreport in a set window size. I have used that as well: http://tavislovell.com/wordpress/how-to-make-ssrs-reports-in-a-performancepoint-dashboard-pop-out-or-open-in-a-new-window-2/
The issue is that I want 'hover over' feature that is found in some other tools. Has anyone successfully done a subreport or 2nd dataset in a tooltip that can be dynamic rows? I essentially want to hover over a cell and get a report to popout at a user for certain cells. Again I understand this could potentially be intense but I would scope it so it would be minimal.
As you've discovered, doing this with just SSRS is an uphill battle. There are a few reasons for this: very few report renderers could support this functionality, SSRS doesn't nicely support inserting custom javascript, potential performance issues. &c, &c. I don't think you'll get far there.
But
If this functionality were absolutely required, my recommendation is to use a custom wrapper website: users would go to the custom website to load a report. The website would make calls to SSRS to retrieve reports. It would scan the resulting HTML for some predetermined special string: INSERTREPORTTOOLTIP(CLIENTID=45) to determine where and what "tooltip charts" need to be generated and inserted.
Not for the faint of heart, I would think this would be at least a 20 hour undertaking if all went really smoothly.
(Also, true "tooltips" implementation is browser dependent, so you really need a div with visibility and perhaps position dynamically controlled.)
Whether you should use SSRS or build your own "report" web page depends on how much other SSRS functionality you are leveraging.
I have a report I need to print out in an application I'm usually doing maintenance for. My question, which interests me beyond the scope of this task is, what are the ways to format an HTML page for printing? What are the pros and cons of each?
Note that the page is meant only to be printed. I'm not asking about an HTML page that looks ok also when printed.
Generally speaking, I know I can either rely heavily on <table>s or on <div>s, but I don't know which way to go.
I would also appreciate some resources to get me started, or to help with known problems, in any method you suggest.
Thanks,
Asaf
As you can certainly see, printing and web presentation are two different creatures. The main issue is the bounds of the printed page, which does not exist in a web page. Even if you think you have a page laid out in a manner that will fit a printed page, then you need to deal with the fact that the font you are using may not work or scale correctly on the user's printer.
I know of three ways to deal with this issue:
Use fixed-sized fonts (like Courier), limit yourself to an 80 column width, and only use font characters: meaning use something like asterisks for borders, etc. This is VERY old school - your reports look simple and old and plain. But, they will always print they way you intended.
Convert your report to an image. Images can be made to confirm to a specific size which can fit on a page. However, you can still have issues due to printer margin settings.
Let another application do the work for you. What I mean by this is put your report into a PDF or a spreadsheet. Both PHP and Perl have easy to use modules for creating a PDF - with no licensing needed. Perl has a fantastic spreadsheet module. This route takes a little learning up front, but frees you from having to be an expert on printing (which can be a real pain).
In case you DO want to have a page that also looks good when viewed in a browser, consider multiple stylesheets for different medias.
Is it possible with business intelligence development studio to create an SSRS report and easily customize the way that the prompt fields are laid out (mainly the location)? It looked like it defaults to grouping them horizontally, I would want to perhaps group the prompts into section.
I'm just getting into using SSRS so my knowledge is limited. I've read a few tutorials but haven't found an answer to this question.
You may be able to change some of the styles and images, but I don't know if you can change the actual layout. It may be possible to do it with the style sheet, as it looks like the UI is generated from a dll.
Start here and poke around:
\ServerName\c$\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\ReportManager\
Styles\ReportingServices.css should let you do some formatting changes - font size, layout, colors, etc.
Styles\RSWebParts.css should let you change more formatting.
MS was even considerate enough to comment thoroughly. I would just start messing around with the "View Source" in your dev environment. See what classes are assigned to the controls you would like to move.
Good luck - could actually be fun.