I’ve recently come to realize what a truly remarkable feature it is to be able to
format report text using simple HTML tags. This capability was added to Reporting
Services in SQL Server 2008. Prior to this, all of the text in a textbox could
be formatted with a font size, bold, italic or what not – but these properties were
applied to all of the text in the textbox. Now, the contents of any textbox
can be either behave as it used to or the contents of a textbox can be converted to
a placeholder for rich-formatted text.
Working on a client’s project, several reports need to be localized. It’s not
so much that reports need to show information in different languages but elements
like the company subsidiary name, division and contact information are different in
various regions of the world where this company conducts business. On contracts
and invoices, the legal terms and disclaimers are different because of regional laws
and different business practices. In the past, they have created different reports
for each region – which has been a high cost maintenance issue.
I’ve created only one version of each report to be localized using a Region parameter.
There’s one Invoice, Quote report and Job Information sheet report. I created
a table in the database containing fields to store the report name, the name of the
text block, the region and the HTML formatted text for the region-specific text block.
In the report, I use a simple dataset with a query that returns the text for that
report using these fields and the parameterized region in the WHERE clause.
It’s a simple but elegant solution to an otherwise complex problem.
Reporting Services supports a short list of simple HTML tags for embedded or data
bound rich text. These include:
· Hyperlinks: <A href>
· Fonts: <FONT>
· Header, style and block elements: <H{n}>, <DIV>, <SPAN>,<P>,
<DIV>, <LI>, <HN>
· Text format: <B>, <I>, <U>, <S>
· List handling: <OL>, <UL>, <LI>
Detailed instructions for this feature are available in the online MSDN
library.
What? No CSS Support?
One of the constants in the universe is that when a new feature is added to a software
application, a lot of users and customers will immediately complain and demand that
the feature be improved to meet some greater need. To this I say quit your
whining and be grateful for what you you have. This is what my parents
used to say before they shared stories about walking up hill in the snow both ways
to and from school. Many reporting products don’t have anything close to this.
When this feature was added, the product team made it a point to keep this feature
simple while giving us some very useful capabilities.
I recently needed to include a rich-formatted legal disclaimer as an ordered number
list with multiple levels of subordinate numbered levels. I know that as a web
designer, this kind of thing can be managed in greater detail using CSS styles which
are not supported by SSRS. The trick in my case was to get the right combination
of nested <LI> and <OL> tags. The following combination did the
trick:
<ol>
<li>First item</li>
<li>Second item
<ol>
<li>First child of second item</li>
<li>Second child of second item</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li>Third item</li>
</ol>
…which produces:
1. First item
2. Second item
i. First child of Second item
ii. Second child of second item
3. Third item
Why doesn’t this feature support Cascading Style Sheets? Simple… the embedded
HTML is not ever parsed by the web browser. These tags are read by the core
report rendering engine which translates the inline tags to static text elements and
then outputs the appropriate content to the appropriate rendering extension.
This means that, like most report features, the rich formatted text is going to work
the same way in reports rendered to PDF, Excel, Word, an image, print or any web browser
because the report content is rendered on the server, rather than in a web browser.
Thanks to Andrew
Karcher, Thiago Silva and Robert
Bruckner for their contributions.
Weblog by Paul Turley and SQL Server BI Blog.
