I have a report that has been working great for years in SSRS 2008. We have brought up an SSRS 2008 R2 report server to test on, and it will not render the report correctly for the PDF export. The report still previews and exports correclty in both Visual Studio 08 and on the old server, it seems to be something with the rendering engine in R2. The actual error in the rendering is this: It looks correct in the html preview, but the export moves part of the last column of the tablix to the next page. What it does with this last column is highly unusual. It is no where near the margin, but moves the detail row of the last column to the next page while leaving the header row in the same column. I tried adjusting the size of the table, the report margins, page size and CanGrow property, all to no avail. Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this and what I could try next?

Take a look at what I responded in the following link. I know you are exporting but this test might apply to exporting as well. Just an idea: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sqlreportingservices/thread/c916982f-e40a-4c69-89a3-98ff5bf94498

Thanks for your suggestion. I did try running it in Firefox and Chrome and no dice. It is an identical PDF in both cases to the IE 8 pdf. Likewise the HTML preview looks correct in all three browsers. I have recently found out that this report was originally created in SSRS 2005 so perhaps there is some strange legacy code behind the report that is causing heartburn for the R2 render engine. I may have to try rebuilding it in 2008 and see if that fixes anything. I really wanted to avoid it because there is a lot going on in the table, lots of groups etc...

If you open the report in one of the new report design tools (VS Report Designer or stand-alone Report Builder 3.0) from SSRS 2008 R2 then it will upgrade the report for you to the latest RDL format. You may want to try rendering it after that to see how it behaves (R2 uses different engine for old 2005 reports vs. new reports including those reports upgraded by the designers from 2005 format). In any case, upgrading the report in the designer should allow you to tweak it from there rather than rebuilding the report from scratch.

It has been "upgraded" from 2005 already...that is the point of this. It has been actively being changed in Visual Studio 2008. We have VS 2010 but it does not natively support the standard report project type so we cannot update it beyond 2008. I suppose I could try to open it through Report Builder 3.0 and give that a try, but I am not sure that it is any different than VS 2008.

I was able to get the report to render correctly in R2 by eliminating a hidden column in the table that was "left over" and not being used. There were two such columns that had a miniscule width and only one of them caused the error. I still have no idea why that column was causing issues since the column next to it was the same size and also hidden, but at least the report seems fixed for now. Thanks everyone for your suggestions!

Thank you for sharing your solutions and experience here. It will be very beneficial for other community members who have similar questions.Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help.

Glad you were able to resolve, however for Microsoft, this is only a partial solution. I understand that R2 has a different rendering, but a bigger issue is that the BIDS report viewer, RB 3.0 viewer and even Firefox render the reports differently than IE. This makes it very difficult and painful for developing & testing, then once deployed the rendering isn't how it was tested.

Hopefully I will upgrading to BIDS 2008 R2 today so I should be able to see if this will cause congruency in how Visual Studio renders compared to the R2 report server. I will try to report back my experience here later on. You are right though it is very confusing to find issues and even more frustrating when things act differently under similar but differing environments.