Dataset Field in Header/Footer disappears in PDF Export

Question

I've been asked to make a small change to one of our RDLs. Essentially, I have some fields in my header/footer which pull information out of the resulting dataset (this is done by creating hidden textbox in the report body, then creating a textbox in the footer with its value set to ReportItems!txtHiddenMsg.Value).

Unfortunately, the message in the footer is dynamic: it displays a customerID and a custom "Thank you for your business" message in the customer's native language in the footer, and there are several customer IDs contained in the report, so the footer text actually changes from page to page. This means its not possible to hard code the text in the footer or bind it to a different dataset.

The report renders just fine in ReportViewer, but the fields disappear when exported to PDF. I don't know how to phrase this problem, so I apologize if this is worded awkardly:

How can I bind a field in the header/footer to a dataset field and without the field disappearing from the PDF export?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the only solution that may work is aspose.pdf PDF export appears to not detect the indirection.

My BI colleague tried this and found it better than the standard solution.

Answer 2

I did some detective work and found that several of our other reports bind columns to the header/footer, and they export just fine. It seems like my report is the exception rather than the norm.

Cause of the problem: The row containing my hidden textboxes was set to invisible (I did this so I wouldn't have to toggle the textboxes individually). It seems like there is a bug undocumented feature in the PDF export where it ignores text in invisible rows.

Solution: I made the row visible and set all of my textboxes to be invisible. Now the report outputs fine, and the export looks fine as well.

Answer 3

Try to use hidden/internal report parameter with default values set to read from dataset.