We have existing SSRS 2005 report which has a sub-report with XML as the data source. The sub-report invokes a wcf web service and displays the result. In case the service is down, the sub-report displays an error at run-time as follows:

Error: Subreport could not be shown.

Since we want to publish this report, in SSRS 2005 we modified the color property of the sub-report to white to hide the error message. This prevented the sub-report error message from appearing in the report and on PDF file when exported.

Now, we migrated this same report to SSRS2012. As expected, the error message is not appearing on screen in the report. But when we export the report to PDF, we can see the error message printed.

It looks like the sub-report Color property is not considered when exporting to PDF or printed.

Any suggestions?