How to prevent autoresizing body in SSRS report

Question

I have a report that has a header and footer that are both set up to fill the whole A4 length (minus margins of course) because I have some information on the far right and far left of each of them. Now in the body I have a List Element that allows me to have a tablix report and a chart next to each other. The body is also sized propery to stay within the pagination limits of the report. All should fit on A4 landscape. Tablix and Chart are next to each other however the Tablix will grow to 4 columns. When this happens the Chart is pushed to the right to just fit A4 landscape. However at the same time SSRS dynamically increases the body size and therefore I end up with emptpy pages when I render the report to PDF. Needless to say that this is very frustrating. Did I miss some essential information or is SSRS implementation of Header/Footer concept just not very smartly done (being part of the body container) because of them I can't reduce the body size so that in case of autogrowth it won't go over A4 landscape size (What I can see as one option to get around this silly behaviour). Best actcually would be to avoid the autogrowth of the body, since there is actually enough space to fit within the given body size for both elements.

any hint would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

I found the reason. On the Report there is a property "ConsumeContainerWhitespace" which is by default set to false. After setting this to true I got the wanted behaviour. Still I'm not very excited by the design of this "feature" but if you feel that your report body dimensions are within the report dimensions and you still have to struggle with blank pages in the rendered reports, have a look at this property.