I am creating a report in SSRS 2008R2.
The report is based off of a single tablix and populated by a single dataset. The tablix contains three distinct areas: 1. Group header (BatchId) 2: details 3: group Footer (BatchId). The Header contains Invoice information (summarized), check details anda list of comments. The footer contains any overflow comments that won't fit on the header. There is a page break between each area.
The problem occurs in trying to determine how to count comment rows. The stored procedure contains a CommentRow field, but this does not work for what I need. The Comment field is varchar(4000) and contains multiple carriage returns and line feeds embedded in the data. For that reason, a single row can be empty, contain a small amount of data, or in one case, populates 28 rows on the page. This causes a large amount of issues with the formatting of the report pages.
My first inclination is to place all comments on the last page and use a textbox on the first page to indicate the existance of the comments (See Complete Comments on last page). This was rejected by the users as most batches only contain one or two short notes and this creates a lot of excess paper for those short comments.
There is another field called ReturnCount that is supposed to identify the CarriageReturns in the comment field. While closer to accurate, it does not allow long comments to be split on the page and the formatting issues remain.
This also creates a blank page situation at the end of each group as I cannot hide the page based on aggregation. The foorter can be hidden by using sum(Fields!ReturnCount), but you cannot use an aggregation to hide a header. At this point, I'm stuck trying to find a way to split the comments and hide the overflow if none exists. Since this is controlled by one stored procedure (cannot be changed for this) I could use some ideas.
Thanks in advance!
Gary