Generate business letters from Reporting Service. A right technology?
My web application should be able to generate business letters and it should be easy enough for customer to change template later by their own. Something like MS Word's mail merge can do. But I don't want to make a web app that call MS Word COM Interop. So far I try to use Reporting Service (Builder version 2) RDL as a letter template. It works fairly fine. But there're some annoyings. 1. TextBox in Reporting Service cannot make justify alignment. 2. There is no way to BOLD only some words in flowed text. I have to split TextBox in pieces and place them altogether. Which is very hard to place them at the right position. I wonder if there is any better solution than this. 3rd-party software suggestion is ok.
March 29th, 2011 4:50pm

You can easily BOLD or ITALIC some words in flowed text. But you have to be on Reporting Services 2008 or later. Sounds like you are using an older version of the product. But even the latest version cannot full justify (left and right justify) text. This is a well known deficiency and don't hold your breath waiting for a fix.
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March 29th, 2011 10:19pm

I am already using Report Builder 2.0 with Reporting Service 2008. Yes. I can bold some words in flowed text but that is the case for static text only. How can I do this with dynamic text? For example, if my letter should display "Dear MR.ABC your salary is 1234" Currently I have only two choices 1. Use one TextBox with Expression = "Dear " + Fields!emp_name.Value + " your salary is " + Fields!salary.Value Which make text flow but cannot bold any words at all. 2. Use 4 TextBoxes, One with "Dear ", second is "=Fields!emp_name.Value", third is "your salary is", and the last is "Fields!salary.Value" Where I can bold the 2nd and 4th TextBox. But this is too cumbersome. Any trick for this problem? If there's a way to deal with this, it will solve almost all of my problems.
March 30th, 2011 12:18am

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd207048.aspx. Right-click in the textbox and click Create Placeholder. By inserting placeholders, you can create text like the following: Dear <<Expr>> your salary is <<Expr>>. You can bind the placeholders to expressions and format them independently.Program Manager, SQL Server Reporting Services
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March 31st, 2011 1:01am

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