SSRS 2008 - Excel Export Date Format and some other formatting tips

microsoftian — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:56:00 GMT

Recently I am working little bit more on SSRS.

Last week, we migrated from SSRS 2005 to SSRS 2008. The migration was smooth except few gotchas in Line charts.

The way we handle empty points (null values) is improved. for more information, look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281301.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb934424.aspx

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Coming to some tips regarding formatting date time, text etc.

1) How do you persist the date format when you export the report to Excel?

In earlier version of SSRS, when we need DateTime format to be international standard dd-MMM-yy, we used convert the datetime to varchar in the query. convert(varchar,mydate,106) which gives dd MMM yy. But when you export the generated report to excel, you can’t play with sorting of that particular date column, as it exports as a string!

SSRS 2008, provides you the flexibility of identifying the type within the report and when you export it will persist the format.

Here is the screenshot where you mention the format, without converting anything the queries…

If you do like that, when you export the report to Excel, it will retain the date format and Excel treats it as a date. If you do string operations in Report, when you export to Excel, it doesn’t treat as a date.

2) How do we custom format text in SSRS reports?

Well, SSRS uses VB syntax to format anything inside the expressions. So, we have to use VB functions to format text.

One good function available in SSRS is Replace(). you can find a character and replace it with what you want.

for example, if you want to replace space with - (hyphen) , how do you do that in SSRS?

Replace(Fields.myValue, Chr(32),Chr(45))

Here is the wiki of list of VB characters:http://www.gtwiki.org/mwiki/index.php?title=VB_Chr_Values

Technorati Tags: SSRS

Adding Carriage Return functionality to Textbox in SSRS 2005

microsoftian — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:40:00 GMT

Consider you have a SQL Server Table with some multiline text data. And that data contains carriage return in it.

Now, if you want to display that data with carriage return in SSRS 2005 textbox, there is no direct way to display it.

Because SSRS 2005 uses VB engine to render the data, where it doesn’t understand line feed-->CHR(10) or Carriage Return -->CHR(13) characters.

So, what is the alternative?

Well, simple we need to use the Replace() function available and replace the specific characters with VbCrLf

ex:

=Replace(First(Fields!YourField.Value, "DataSource"),CHR(10),VbCrLf) –>This worked for me.

=Replace(First(Fields!YourField.Value, "DataSource"),CHR(13),VbCrLf)

In my case, The user was entering the data into SQL Server Database from an InfoPath form and wanted the carriage return to be persisted in the report. And in this case, CHR(10) worked instead of CHR(13).

Good to see SSRS 2008 added lot of rich text functionality, where you don't have to deal with these kind of silly things..,

Happy Reporting!