SSRS - Producing a report that is not dynamic in size

Question

I want to build a report that is completely static in size and shape. I'm attempting to mimic a hand-entered report that someone in my organization has been building from a word doc for years.

The critical piece appears to be fixing the number of rows that are produced in the various Table grids that fill the page. I would like them to always contain a set number of rows, whether data is present or not. It would seem that if I can just fix the size my tables, then all the other elements will not be forced to move because of stretching repeater sections.

All my grids are backed by stored procedures, so I'm open to SQL tricks as well.

Answer 1

Sorry i did miss-read the question.

If you know how many rows you need to return (say 20) maybe you could pad some bogus info into your records returned from the stored procedure. You might be able to count the records your query has returned before you send them back, and if you have less than 20 add some bogus ones to the record set, put something like 'NonDisp' or something in them.

Then in the report put an iif statement into the cells that checks for this bogus info, if it is found change the cell to display nothing, otherwise show the valid values

Answer 2

Not a direct answer, but perhaps a workaround you might consider: perhaps you can insert a page break after the table grids that have dynamic sizes, so that all elements that follow it have a fixed position (relative to the top of the page).