Reporting Services 2005 - Printing Graph - An error occurred during printing. (0x80004005)

Question

Hello,

I am trying to print a report that contains a bar graph using the report viewer, but running into an error. My reporting server is running SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services SP3 on Windows Server 2003 SP2.

Here are some steps that will reproduce the problem (at least for me)...

1. On a clean machine, I open up the report, and it displays fine.
2. I then click the print button, and I am prompted to install the RSClientPrint ActiveX control. The control downloads and installs fine.
3. I then click the print button again, and the print dialog appears.
4. I select a printer, and click "OK".
5. A message box appears that has the following text (including the spelling error)...

An error occured during printing. (0x80004005)

Any other report I try to print works fine. The only difference between this report and the other ones is that it contains a bar graph. If I remove the graph from the report, redeploy it, and then re-run it, it prints without getting that error.

As far as I know, it is not isolated to a specific machine. It happens to every customer I have talked to, and a variety of machines here in the office.

Has anyone seen anything like this? I have seen similar posts on the web suggesting to uninstall video drivers on the reporting server (thinking the GDI dlls have become corrupt ), install service packs, etc. I have tried every suggestion, but haven't found a good solution yet.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I ended up having to use a paid Microsoft incident on this, but it is resolved now. The issue was that I had a matrix in my report that had dynamic columns. Depending on exactly which date range you picked, the report could have n number of columns. In my case, when a date range was chosen that produced three or more of these dynamic columns, it would cause the matrix to become too large and run outside of the margins of the report.

The report would run and display fine with the matrix being too large, but the incredibly non-descriptive error would display whenever the report was printed or exported.

I resolved the issue by reducing the size of other columns and the overall font size in the report. This prevents the matrix from running off the page in the case of date ranges that produce three dynamic columns. It doesn't solve it in the general case (four or more columns will make it fail), but is good enough for my current purposes.

Microsoft didn't have a fix for the general case (such as a way to make the matrix fixed width).

I figured I should answer this in case anyone else runs across it.

-David