从URL到Word的SSRS 2008呈现与从已在屏幕上呈现的报表导出提供不同的输出

Question

I have a report created in VS2008 on SQL Server 2008 (SP3). The report comprises of several sub reports nested 3 or 4 levels down in some instances. Document Maps are used extensively so that Word Tables of Contents can be generated further down the line.

Now here's the problem.

If I render to screen either in the development environment or rendered the deployed report from the reporting services server, then everything is OK. If I export the report in any format (tested with Word, PDF & Excel) then the output is as expected.

However, if I create a URL including all the parameters something like

http://MYSERVERNAME/ReportServer/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?%2fMYPATH%2fMYREPORTNAME&PARAM1=999&PARAM2=999&PARAM3=999&rs:Command=Render&rs:Format=HTML4.0

then paste this into an IE window, the output is incorrect. Well let me clarify that.

If I render as above using the HTML4.0 rendering extension then the report renders on screen as expected, all the content is shown. If I render to Word by changing the rs:Format parameter to Word then the report renders but the first page is missing (see note about this content below) If I render to PDF, the same part of the report is missing. If I render to Excel, the document map generated on the first workbook sheet shows an entry for the missing section of report but clicking the click gives and 'invalid reference' error and indeed that part of the report is again not rendered.

Note that the 'master' report for want of a better term is made up of 3 subreports, each of these contain other sub reports.

Its the content of the first subreport, that also happens to only every show on the first page (as it is just less than a page long) that is missing. In Word there is something rendered but it looks like an empty table with a width that is the full width of the page but a heigh of just a few millimetres.

I'm really at a loss as to why the section does not render when it works perfectly if rendered to screen and then exported. I had assumed they would use the same rendering process but I'm not sure.

I'll continue to experiment, maybe add some blank content before the problem section or something and see where I get but I'm puzzled as to why this happens, other reports do not suffer the problem (however I have only tested 3 or 4 or the hundreds that I have written). I've not used the URL method much in the past but I got to this point as I was writing ac# application to run the same report with varying parameters to produce over 1200 word documents, each of which takes about 2 mins to run. the output was incorrect there so I worked my way back to creating a manual URL and the problem was still apparent, the rest is history!

Answer 1

I finally found the answer.

The subreport that was causing the problems takes parameters that are subsequently passed on to other child subreports. While I was testing these, I had datasets that provided the available values for the parameters (list of countries and their associated ID's for example).

My normal method of working is to remove all datasets that are only used to populate parameters in all subreports as this improves performance (the report does not have to query the database to get a list of countries for example).

However, on this occasion I had removed all the datasets (which in itself was fine) but I had left the datasource in place (visible in the report data pane).

Once I removed this redundant entry, the report rendered as expected.

Now I'm still not sure why it rendered OK to HTML4.0 but it would appear that when rendering to other formats there is some process going on that looks at the datasource perhaps and as there is no data (as there are no datasets) then the report is not rendered. That's a bit of a guess but it's the only thing that makes sense to me at the moment.