SSRS 2008 printing single page renders different for print

Question

I have a problem with SSRS 2008 reports rendering differently on the reporting server than the way it renders when you print the report. I’m trying to figure out to print a single page and have the print show that same records as I see on the report on the screen. As a test, I created a simple report with no headers or footers and just added a Tablix table to display the records (no groupings). My data set for this test displays 2 ¼ pages of records when I deploy it to our reporting services server and run it. If I click the print Icon and preview the report is 2 ¾ pages. I haven’t found anything searching on this so it makes me think it is something simple I’m missing. A basically want the report to render the same records on each page in Report Manager as it does when it prints, how do I accomplish this?

(In response to answer posted by Chris)…If that is the case then it is disappointing. Customers are accustomed to WYSIWYG and will have a hard time understanding that, I imagine we will be getting a lot of support calls.

This still leaves an issue. I tried using print preview and could not find any way to single out a page. If I select a page up front to print, or preview it renders different so I get different records. And if I preview the entire document, I can only print the entire document.

You mentioned the Excel render; we have customers that will want that also. The problem I have found with Excel exports is that even a basic report winds up merging some cells and that messes up sorting. I’m going to try your tip about grouping to see if I can get a clean export to a page. It would have been nice if they would have created a property for certain controls like the tablix table called “ExcelSheet”. Then all you would have to do is give it a name and it would create a new sheet for each control with a name, the name becoming the sheet title.

Thanks for the information you supplied it is very useful as I’m new to SSRS. If you know how I can Preview in print render and select individual pages to print from the render let me know.

Update 02/19/2010 After testing this more I now realize it is just a bad design of Report managers print driver or a limitation because it is server based. The options work differently than Windows apps drivers, But I did find a work around. Here is the test I performed comparing Excel to Report Manager.

I bring up a report that will render more than 1 page when printed. I then export to Excel, in Excel I select print preview. I can navigate the pages in preview and then select a single page like page 3. I can then print just page 3 without leaving print preview and it prints just like it rendered. I cannot do this using print in report manager.

If I select print preview in report manager then try to print while in preview it always prints the entire document. However if I close out of print preview, I can then select page 3 and print it as rendered. It is just one additional step once you know what to do, but it took some time to figure it out.

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 print renderer does as the print renderer is constrained by the paper size that it formats to. Thus you get more pages when rendering for printing 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 print version even though the InteractiveHeight is set to the same length as your target page length.

See this discussion of rendering behaviour for more information on why what you are trying to achieve isn't achievable.