Chris Hays's sleazy "continued" hack almost works
Chris Hays posted this blog post about repeating group headers on each page, having them say "MyGroup (continued)" on all but the first page. This post went up Sept 27th and was a great stroke of luck on my part b/c my current client really wanted this functionality to match an existing report they've generated using a competing product.
Chris's blog post gives us the 5 step process and a complete code sample which I used to try to solve this problem. No problem. I worked my way through his example and got the functionality working with a continued header and subheader.
Sort of
Turns out there is a (debatable) bug in SSRS. I say it's debatable because I'm still waiting for Microsoft support to get back to me and tell me that it's a bug. Anyway, here is the problem. I've got a report which is set up to print in landscape format. When it's printed, there are about 17 printed pages. However, the development IDE preview mode (that's Visual Studio 2005) and the Report Manager web application both do pagination differently - showing me 10 pages. However, for these 10 pages, my "continued" headers work as expected. Unfortunately, my clients are serving up their reports as PDFs with no web view. When the report gets rendered to PDF, the logic to conditionally show my "continued" headers breaks entirely. It's as if writing to PDF doesn't support this. However, I know that the problem isn't with the PDF format itself because the competitor's product works beautifully to display the "continued" headers.
I'm still waiting to hear from Microsoft on this. I'll be sure to post updates. I'm also waiting on some scrubbed data from the client which I'd be able to distribute.
<update>
It turns out that there is a bug with the PDF (and TIFF) rendering where hidden fields are simply not instantiated. However, there is a serviceable workaround. Instead of conditionally hiding my fields, I'm now conditionally turning them white. You also have to have your control fields visible but white. I'll post my sample RDL at some point, but not now as I'm going to be late to the user group meeting tonight and that means I'll miss the pizza!
</update>