Question

I’ve got a report in SSRS 2008 that is using a web service as one of its data sources. The basic look of the XML returned is

<table>     <row>         <column1>data</column1>         <column2 xsi:nil='true' />         <column3>data</column3>     </row> </table> 

Any tags with the ‘nil’ attribute are showing up as blank on the report. I’d like to replace any blanks with a dash. Since it is a numeric field and zero has meaning in the report, I can’t simply change the web service to return zero or an empty string. I’ve tried to do several kinds of conditional compares to swap them, but they all show up as ‘#Error’ on the report:

=iff(Field!column2.Value Is Nothing, '-', Field!column2.Value) =iff(IsNothing(Field!column2.Value), '-', Field!column2.Value) =iff(Field!column2.Value = '', '-', Field!column2.Value) =iff(CStr(Field!column2.Value) = '', '-', Field!column2.Value) 

Any ideas?

Edit: It wasn’t the check for empty that was failing, it was a nested conditional inside the first IIF. Once removed, I was able to make it work.

Answer 1

I didn’t have a problem using:

 =Iif(cstr(First(Fields!RegInceptionDate.Value, 'spimRptPerfSummary')) = '', '-', First(Fields!RegInceptionDate.Value, 'spimRptPerfSummary')) 

This is what my dataset looks like:

<Query>    <Method Namespace='http://www.abc.com/' Name='TWRPerformanceSummary'/>    <SoapAction>http://www.abc.com/TWRPerformanceSummary </SoapAction>       <ElementPath IgnoreNamespaces='true'>         TWRPerformanceSummaryResponse/TWRPerformanceSummaryResult/diffgram/NewDataSet/table{PkRegistration, InceptionDate(date),RegInceptionDate(string)}    </ElementPath> </Query> 

My expression was in a textbox, thats why I have it wrapped in a First() on the DataSet. I cast the RegInceptionDate on the dataset as string (its really a date, but since its coming back null it didn’t matter). I’m not sure the cstr() in the expression is necessary since I have the cast on the dataset itself.