Debugging Paging in Sql Reporting Services

Question

I'm working on my first significant Sql Reporting Services project and am having problems with paging. Most of the reports are already working.

What is happening is that I"m getting different numbers and locations of page breaks between Web Reportviewer, PDF and Word documents. The word is the closest, but none of the three are really correct.

I've looked for the for the obvious like extra paging and making sure the report does not go outside of the left or right margins. My problem is that I'm not sure how to go about troubleshooting reports that pages that do not break in the correct location.

Does anyone have a suggestion where to start?

I'm using VS2008, SQL2008 DE on Vista Dev box.

Answer 1

This isn't really a problem - the different renderers are rendering the report appropriately for their output. The web viewer is optimised for screen-based reading and generally allows more content per page than the PDF viewer does as the PDF viewer is constrained by the paper size that it formats to. Thus you get more pages when rendering for PDF than web; however, the content of the report is exactly the same.

The best illustration of this is the Excel renderer - the Excel renderer renders the entire report onto a single worksheet in most cases (for reports with grouping and page breaks set on the group footer it will render each group on its own worksheet). You wouldn't want the Excel renderer to artificially create worksheets to try to paginate your report. It does the appropriate thing which is to include all the data in one big worksheet even though that may be logically thought of as one big "page".

The web renderer page length is determined by the InteractiveHeight attribute of the report (in the InteractiveSize property in the Properties pane for the report) but the interactive height is an approximation rather than a fixed page break setting and your page breaks may still not conform to the PDF version even though the InteractiveHeight is set to the same length as your target page length.