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How-to-integrate an SSRS report design

Posted by Intellicore Ltd Wednesday 20 February 2013 3 comments

Best practice when designing a RDL report:

Always put controls of a section/sub-section in a rectangle, for correct alignment. This will save positioning and sizing of set of controls as a whole, especially when rendering to different formats or exporting to PDF.

While concatenating more than 1 field/values (e.g. complete address or Full name) use t/sql functions of STUFF & COALESCE.

For example, following is for column CustomerAddressLine consisting of multiple column/field values, with inclusion of line feed
STUFF( COALESCE(', ' + NULLIF(I.itg_customeraddress1, ''), '') + COALESCE(', ' + NULLIF(I.itg_customeraddress2, ''), '') , 1, 1, '')
+ char(10) +
STUFF( COALESCE(', ' + NULLIF(I.itg_customeraddress3, ''), '') + COALESCE(', ' + NULLIF(I.itg_customercity, ''), '') , 1, 1, '')
AS “CustomerAddressLine",

For landscape layout set width as 29cm and height as 14 cm, inclusive of Report Properties of Page margins. For Portrait style – the Default Page size should do. This layout will ensure right rendering when exporting to PDF/Adobe file format.

Dashed/Dotted line can underlined for field/values using BorderStyle for Bottom part of the SSRS report.

For checks/ticks/tick marks use FONT Wingdings or webdings.

Segregation of DataRows can be done using Row num and combining with proper logic around it. Refer dataset dsDetector & dsDetector2.

In VS2005, when there is need to show recurring sub-reports Table control can be used. Each of table body can refer to sub-report with its own set of parameters.

This covers most of the best practices to make sure report rendering is applied without surprises , although there are sure to be more. Most people still learn something new every time they use it!

The key to a good use of SSRS Report is knowing your selection tools properly, and being able to choose the most appropriate one for the task will save lots of time.

Note: Above rules are applicable when designing/creating with Visual Studio 2005.