No underline shown on links, Action, Hyperlink, Drillthrough in Reporting Services R2 and Denali

If you’re using the ReportViewer 8.0 web control for Reporting Services 2005 in your web application and pointing at Report Server version R2 or Denali then you may see this bug – some font properties such as Color and TextDecoration do not render on an Action element (used for BookmarkLink, Hyperlink and Drillthrough). To get round this you can turn your property values to expressions e.g. change:

<TextDecoration>Underline</TextDecoration>

to:

<TextDecoration>="Underline"</TextDecoration>

Thanks to JhonnyGaleano for the tip-off on msdn forums

Here’s the full, fixed RDL for a Textbox with Action and Drillthrough:

<TextboxName=“section_0_FullName“>

<Style>

  <BorderColor>

   <Default>#2F5098</Default>

  </BorderColor>

  <BorderStyle>

   <Default>Solid</Default>

   <Right>None</Right>

  </BorderStyle>

  <BorderWidth>

   <Default>0.1mm</Default>

  </BorderWidth>

  <BackgroundColor>=IIF(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, “#ffffff”, “#faf9f7″)

  </BackgroundColor>

  <FontStyle>=”Italic”</FontStyle>

  <FontFamily>=”Tahoma”</FontFamily>

  <FontSize>=”8pt”</FontSize>

  <FontWeight>=”Bold”</FontWeight>

  <Format />

  <TextDecoration>=”Underline”</TextDecoration>

  <TextAlign>Right</TextAlign>

  <Color>=”#00ff00″</Color>

  <PaddingLeft>1mm</PaddingLeft>

  <PaddingRight>1mm</PaddingRight>

  <PaddingTop>0.5mm</PaddingTop>

  <PaddingBottom>1mm</PaddingBottom>

</Style>

<Action>

<Drillthrough>

  <ReportName>/RSinteract Samples/Orders by Category</ReportName>

  <Parameters>

   <ParameterName=“FullName“>

    <Value>=Fields!FullName.Value</Value>

   </Parameter>

   </Parameters>

  </Drillthrough>

</Action>

<Value>=Fields!FullName.Value</Value>

<CanGrow>true</CanGrow>

<DataElementName>FullName</DataElementName>

</Textbox>

As this problem doesn’t affect reports viewed through Report Manager on Denali I’m guessing it only affects earlier versions of ReportViewer – if so, you may find it easier to upgrade your web application to use the latest ReportViewer control.

If you want help updating large numbers of existing reports then please get in touch below or through our contact form – we have plenty of code we could put together to create a mass report-update tool…

RSinteract Imminent Release

We’ve been really busy over the last year adding new features and working with our partners to integrate RSinteract with their web applications. The result is currently a beta release available for download here. New features include:

• Multitenancy support through custom data and security extensions
• Support for SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7
• Intelligent data discovery and cleansing of table and field names
• Blank value matching in filters and conditional formatting
• Ability to add links and drill-through to charts and indicators
• Improved date search and caching for OLAP data sources
• Improved editing of field width and font formatting

In the next few months we’ll be working on support for Oracle data sources; a configurable meta layer for field names, formatting and joining; and dynamic filters such as this week and year to date. Watch this space…

Dogfooding RSinteract

On any software project it’s important for managers to have some sort of system in place to keep track of how long tasks are taking and how much time has been spent collectively on a project. Gathering this data is fairly easy (with the right tool), for RSinteract we have a TimeBooking application written internally that collects the data. It’s fairly simple: client, task, comments, lots of drop downs for each half hour slot in the day. It works.

The problem is getting this data in a useable form to make decision on… but wait! We’re making a reporting tool. What better way to look at our time booking data than in a nicely formatted report!

Here’s an example of my time as booked back in the second week of December. I’ve quickly made a weekly time sheet using our _Reporting view in the time booking database with filters for employee and week commencing. I can now save this and look at anyone’s time for any given week! Clever eh?

Using products internally like this is known in the industry as “dogfooding” as in “eats its own dog food”. This gives us a good idea of how our clients may use the software and also highlights problems that we might not otherwise pick up in our usual testing.

Indicators Demo

Here’s a quick demo of the new indicators feature. It’s a pretty trivial one but shows the potential.

http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf