SSRS 2008 Header height issues due to merged columns

When working on a report today we ran into an issue which took us quite some testing to figure out. At some point we decided to switch some of the headers of columns around and when rendering the report again it for some reason created a header which was way heigher then the biggest text there, showing a huge empty space in the header underneath the text.

My first guess was that there had to be some extra spaces in some column or something alike, which made the cells grow so much. This however was not the case. As a next step I cleared the cells in the headerrow one by one to figure out which field was making the header grow this much. It turned out to be the header in the 10th column. When I replaced the text in this cell, it did not make the header grow anymore. When I put the original text back, it started growing again. As a next step I removed the text in this cell, pasted it in another cell (column 11) and rendered the report, with the same huge header again. Out of frustration I tried a desperate last move, copied it to column 1 and rendered the report, the effect was a small header without some weird height. So the conclusion was that this text was making the header grow hugely in the columns 10 and 11, but not in column 1? What is the difference between column 10/11 and column 1?

Then I noticed that column 7, 8 and 9 were pretty small columns, only holding integer values. The header above this, however, was one word, so the 3 cells in the header for these columns were MERGED. So basicly, only looking at the cells in the header, my huge text was in the 8th cell from the left, not the 10th (10th column, but due to merging the 8th cell). As a test I editted the width of the 8th column (the middle one of the merged cells) to be as wide as all the other columns holding text. The rendering of the report, with the huge text in the original headercolumn, now did not grow my header to be extremely big. This combined with the way "hiding" works in SSRS 2008 oppose to SSRS 2005 (ie, in 2008 a hidden cell disappears completly, moving all next cells up to the left, where as in 2005 a hidden cell just shows as empty in the report), leads me to believe that there is a bug in SSRS 2008 considering cell widths and merged cells? It is like the 10th column header now thinks it is part of the 8th column (being the 8th cell in its row due to merging) and therefor works with the width of this 8th column to judge how much increased height it needs. In fact it is the width of the 10th column and therefor doesnt need the height it creates, resulting in a huge empty space underneath the text.

Is this a known issue by Microsoft? Any ETA on this for a fix?

July 1st, 2011 3:22pm

This combined with the way "hiding" works in SSRS 2008 oppose to SSRS 2005 (ie, in 2008 a hidden cell disappears completly, moving all next cells up to the left, where as in 2005 a hidden cell just shows as empty in the report), leads me to believe that there is a bug in SSRS 2008 considering cell widths and merged cells?

Hi Joel_i,

I was a little confused with the paragraph above. Could you please elaborate it?

Based on the information posted, I tried to reproduce the scenario, but it works fine. During my test, the header cells grow only when the text in the head column is too long which will caused newline, or there is some extra space in some columns. So, you might need to check the properties of the 8<sup>th</sup> column cell, such asSpaceAfer, SpaceBefore, to make sure all properties are set rightly.

To provide you further assistance, could you please post the report and dataset with sample data to our data collection E-mail address?

E-mail: sqltnsp AT microsoft.com (Please replace the AT with @, and remove additional spaces).

Thanks,
Lola Wang

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July 5th, 2011 12:25pm

I also have this issue.  Just to reiterate the same problem:

I have a table with 3 columns (which are all quite narrow).  I added 2 rows above for a header and a sub-header.

I merged the top row (of the 3 cols) and added my main header title, which fits nicely in one line in the merged cell (within the design mode)

When the report renders, there is a bunch of white space under the main header.  One of the many things I tried was (in design mode), widen the first column and when it renders....the white space is no longer there.

It seems that on the rendering of the merged cell, it "thinks" it still has the width of the first column and renders the row height accordingly.....even though the text shows up on one line.

Odd.... any work arounds?

April 7th, 2015 6:59pm

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