I’ve been fighting with SSRS for too long now on what should be a simple matter. I’m hoping someone can help me see a solution.
I have a report which has a number of profiles, and each profile has a large number of data sections. The data sections (various tables and charts) are not related to each other in any way other than that they “key” back to the parent profile id.
The goal (which seems simple) is to have a header on each page with the profile information, and then have the data sections (each formatted completely differently) laid out.
The first problem we encountered was that for some reason SSRS2008 does not allow a tablix cell to contain another tablix with a different dataset (why it can’t just require a filter based on the parent grouping is beyond me). The recommended workaround for this shortcoming is to either combine all data into a giant dataset (not possible here, data sections are too numerous and varied) or to embed subreports and pass in the parameters. While option number two increases the “work” needed to print a large number of profiles, we proceeded to implement this and it does work.
The problem comes in on the main tablix (the one containing the subreports) that has a static row header group set with “RepeatOnNewPage = true”. This setting allows the header to show on every page as desired… except for subreports the span multiple pages, where the header is incorrectly ommitted.
For some reason, when the subreport spans multiple pages, the header of the parent tablix is not repeated! This is driving me insane as it would seem that a couple bad design decisions in SSRS has put me in a situation where I can’t create the report I want… headers works without subreports, but I need subreports in order to “join” the data sections to the profile.
This would seem to be a simple and common requirement… after all, it’s a report that is being migrated from a decades old reporting system. I’ve scoured StackOverflow and Google without success… I’ve seem a number of questions/answers about page breaks, but nothing that suggests a solution to this problem with subreports.
I’m posting this in case I’m missing something. If anyone has any suggestions at all, it would be much appreciated.
We’ve solved our problem… although not in the most ideal way.
The Page Header (of the “master” report, not the subreports) seems to be the only way to consistently have a header section.
We implemented a solution based in large part on this blog posting:
Maintaining State in Reporting Services 2008
We modified slightly from the blog post, removing “id” from the methods and including a GUID to ensure the report values are not mixed up even if the user runs several copies of the report at the same time. (When using shared variables, remember that they are global to the report running across execution instances and across users on the report server, so a lot of care needs to be taken when they are used!)
In the report body we have a hidden text block that calls:
and in the report page header we reference these as (for example):
This works because the body is calculated before the page header, even for Page 1.
Still, in the end it is a hack for something that should be in Microsoft’s product, given that they have poured years of development into this product! Why we cannot have nested tablix’s and easier to use headers is beyond me… again this is upgrading a report from a program from the early 90’s which did all this without problem. At the very least, give us report variables that can be retrieved and set as the report is processed!
Regardless, things are as they are… we’ve tested the solution with shared variables and it seems to be working very well. We’re going to run stress tests to make sure it’s implemented correctly, I’ll post something here if we find any further problems.
(And if anyone knows of some other way to get consistent header rows on pages, even when there are detail rows with large heights, please share…)