SSRS how to use If and format statement together for negative values

Question

I am trying to display seconds as minutes. Sometimes the value I get is negative. This causes problems. I wanted to check if the value is negative so that I can assign a default value. But I can not get If and Format statement work together.

This is what I have done to display the values without converting into minutes:

=Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value

This is what I have done to convert the seconds into minutes:

=Format(DateAdd("s", Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value, "00:00"), "mm:ss")

This is the code I used to add a condition:

=IIF(Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value < 0, 0, Format(DateAdd("s", Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value, "00:00"), "mm:ss"))

As you can see the if statement does not work as desired.

Answer 1

The #Error is caused due to SSRS evaluate the whole IIF() expression before the IIF logic flow, so even if you are handling the negative values it checks both branches for errors.

Try using this expression:

=IIF(
  Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value < 0, 0,
  Format(
    DateAdd("s",IIF(Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value<0,0,Fields!RateLossSeconds.Value),"00:00"),
    "mm:ss"
  )
)

It checks if there is a negative value in the False branch of the first IIF(). In this case I replace the negative values by zero but you can use any value you want to.

Let me know if this helps.