Valuable Learnings

How to display dynamic columns in Reports? Let me explain what I mean dynamic here. I have a stored procedure which return some columns depending on User choice. In that case I dont have any clue about the columns which are in the report. In plain english, whatever dataset is coming from database, I need to display that information in a table or matrix. The dataset may contain 2columns or 25 columns. How to achieve this? After so much search I found an interesting property in SQL Server Reporting services for all Fields. There will be a property 'IsMissing' for each Field in the Dataset we defined in the report. To achieve dynamic behavior, I Created a table with all possible columns and toggled the visibility of the columns depending on their IsMissing status. For each column in the table there will be a Visibility Expression set on Hide Property. For Example, say the column is binded to a column 'Name' the details cell will have text Fields!Name.Value. The visibility ...

This is one of the common requirement for most of the report developers. Many times we need to display table header vertically. When I came across this, I did a bit googling. But no where it is documented properly. Then I checked all the properies available for the Text box. Vertical text with reports can be done with one small property change. There will be a property called 'WritingMode'. By default the writing mode will be lr-tb. If we change that to tb-lr the text in that text box will be written vertically. Follow the steps to get vertical headers: Go to the Textbox in which you need Vertical Text Press F4 or Goto Properties Window Search for WritingMode Property and change the value to 'tb-lr' You can check your report preview for the changes. Happy reporting!!