Conditional Visibility and Page Breaks with SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services

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I know there's a bug with conditional visibility and page breaks with SQL 2005, but I wonder if anyone has come up with a work around.

I have a table that has a conditional visibility expression, and I need a page break at the end of the table.

If I set the PageBreakAtEnd property to true. It is ignored no matter what. Remove the visibility condition and it works.
If I place the table inside a rectangle with the conditional visibility on the table, and the page break on the table. Same result. The page break property is ignored.
If I set the rectangle with the PageBreakAtEnd property and the table with the visibility condition, then I still get a page break even when the table isn't shown.

Any other ideas on what to try? I'm almost at the point where I need a separate report rather than conditional visibility 🙁

Edit: @Josh: That has the same problems. If the second table has conditional visibility it doesn't work. If it doesn't have the visibility expression, then I get the page break all the time.

@Erick: I really wanted that to be the answer but unfortunately it doesn't work. When the visibility expression evaluates to hidden, there's a big gap where the rectangles would be (which I can live with), and when it evaluates to visible, the page breaks still don't work.

Best Answer

Place two rectangles, one inside the other.
Place your table inside the inner rectangle and set it to always be visible.
Set the inner rectangle's Page Break to Insert After Rectangle.
Set the outer rectangle's visibility to use your conditional expression.

The page break and the conditional visibility are now separated, and the inner rectangle's page break won't be processed if it is not visible, but it will if it is visible.

Edit: When I tried this, it did not appear to work in the Preview tab in Visual Studio, but it did work in the Print Preview and when I exported the report to PDF.

Syntax:

ALTER TABLE {TABLENAME} 
ADD {COLUMNNAME} {TYPE} {NULL|NOT NULL} 
CONSTRAINT {CONSTRAINT_NAME} DEFAULT {DEFAULT_VALUE}
WITH VALUES

Example:

ALTER TABLE SomeTable
        ADD SomeCol Bit NULL --Or NOT NULL.
 CONSTRAINT D_SomeTable_SomeCol --When Omitted a Default-Constraint Name is autogenerated.
    DEFAULT (0)--Optional Default-Constraint.
WITH VALUES --Add if Column is Nullable and you want the Default Value for Existing Records.

Notes:

Optional Constraint Name:
If you leave out CONSTRAINT D_SomeTable_SomeCol then SQL Server will autogenerate
a Default-Contraint with a funny Name like: DF__SomeTa__SomeC__4FB7FEF6

Optional With-Values Statement:
The WITH VALUES is only needed when your Column is Nullable
and you want the Default Value used for Existing Records.
If your Column is NOT NULL, then it will automatically use the Default Value
for all Existing Records, whether you specify WITH VALUES or not.

How Inserts work with a Default-Constraint:
If you insert a Record into SomeTable and do not Specify SomeCol's value, then it will Default to 0.
If you insert a Record and Specify SomeCol's value as NULL (and your column allows nulls),
then the Default-Constraint will not be used and NULL will be inserted as the Value.

Notes were based on everyone's great feedback below.
Special Thanks to:
@Yatrix, @WalterStabosz, @YahooSerious, and @StackMan for their Comments.

Sql – Simulating group_concat MySQL function in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

No REAL easy way to do this. Lots of ideas out there, though.

Best one I've found:

SELECT table_name, LEFT(column_names , LEN(column_names )-1) AS column_names
FROM information_schema.columns AS extern
CROSS APPLY
(
    SELECT column_name + ','
    FROM information_schema.columns AS intern
    WHERE extern.table_name = intern.table_name
    FOR XML PATH('')
) pre_trimmed (column_names)
GROUP BY table_name, column_names;

Or a version that works correctly if the data might contain characters such as <

WITH extern
     AS (SELECT DISTINCT table_name
         FROM   INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS)
SELECT table_name,
       LEFT(y.column_names, LEN(y.column_names) - 1) AS column_names
FROM   extern
       CROSS APPLY (SELECT column_name + ','
                    FROM   INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS AS intern
                    WHERE  extern.table_name = intern.table_name
                    FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE) x (column_names)
       CROSS APPLY (SELECT x.column_names.value('.', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)')) y(column_names)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Sql – Add a column with a default value to an existing table in SQL Server

Syntax:

Example:

Notes:

Sql – Simulating group_concat MySQL function in Microsoft SQL Server 2005

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