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August 2007 Entries
SSRS - lack of stylesheet support and variable column widths
I have recently gotten involved with SQL Server Reporting Services. I have been shocked at how many features and functions seem to be missing. The biggest of these is the lack of support for css stylesheets. If you notice I said stylesheets, not stylesheet. There needs to be support for both a html viewer stylesheet and a printer stylesheet. The first RDL I created looked great on screen. It wasn't until I printed it that I realized it was spread across 14 pages. Luckily I just had a lot of whitespace so it wasn't too bad, but it still spread across two sheets. I then fixed the report RDL so that it prints well, and now I have a bunch of whitespace on the screen.
 
This leads me to my next point, why are the column widths fixed. I would like to have the ability to say that I have 10 columns and each of them are 10%. Then just let IE (and others) format it to match the screen size. 
 
Another reason I mentioned two stylesheets earlier is a simple one. We have customers who want shading on their headers when they view it, but they don't want to waste the toner printing the dark bar at the top of each report. 
 
Am I the only one complaining about this problem.  Am I missing something?   Hopefully someone is listening that can make a difference here.
posted @ Tuesday, August 07, 2007 9:53 PM | Feedback (1)
Blackberry HTML Email

First of all, I love my blackberry curve.  That being said, I have had one big complaint.  When I get emails that are html, I get the raw html instead of a well formatted email.  I don't understand why they don't provide this.  Their browser works well.

I've found a solution.  For only $10, you can download a plugin for your blackberry that will display your HTML email with a decent format.  Take a look at Empower HTML Mail by Mobylo.  It works pretty well.  When you first download this, it will have an ugly sky background, but you can change it to white.  At first, I had it set up to default to show all my emails this way, but it seem to be a performance hit.  I know have it set up so I can toggle it on when I need it.  That works great, althought it would be nice if they had a hot key to set that.  The emails do pull all of the embedded graphics, but it's not the true formatted html that you would see in Outlook.  This shocked me at first, but I like this better now.  I'm sure it would be a much longer download and render time otherwise.

I still think this functionality should be provide for free by RIM, but these guys earned their $10 with the product they built.  Nice product!

posted @ Friday, August 03, 2007 9:59 PM | Feedback (3)
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