Question

I am customizing an SSRS report, using an existing DataSource and DataSet. I can’t edit the DataSet definition (no permissions and I’m not going to get it), so I have to work with the data provided. My problem is that some of the data is a bit garbled. I’m attempting to group columns on an “Iteration” text column, but it contains data like:

Iteration 01
...
Iteration 09
Iteration 1
Iteration 10
Iteration 11
....
Pending Scope

The “Iteration 1” field is in the middle and is really messing me up. How can I move this to the beginning of the set, or ideally merge it with Iteration 01? I can’t do it in SQL, and it’s not a trivial “number format”, so I can’t just apply a format to it.

How can group & display the data above with the numbers properly zero-padded on the left?

Answer 1

Many ways to do this, but which is best depends on the details of your incoming data. If the sample in the question is fairly complete then I would put some embedded code into the report:

Function ParsedTitle(Title As String) as String
    Dim s as String
    s = TRIM(Right(Title,2))
    Dim num as Integer
    If Len(Title) < 2 Then
      return Title
    End If
    If Not Integer.TryParse(s, num) Then
        return Title
    End If
    Return TRIM(LEFT(Title, Len(Title)-2) ) + " " + num.ToString("00")

End Function

(This was only lightly tested.)

Then set the expression in a field to be:

=Code.ParsedTitle(Fields!Title.Value)