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SSRS: Prevent report content from being pushed down

I am working for the Vanuatu government at the moment and there is a very specific reporting requirement. The report needs to generate a formal document ("statement") for students ("learners") who have achieved some courses ("components") of a full qualification but not the complete qualification. The dataset consists of a list of learners and for each learner the list of components they have achieved.

The requirements that generate issues:

  1. A border should be displayed around the page content.
  2. The number of components vary per learner.
  3. There is specific data at the top and at the bottom of the page. At the bottom of the page there is data here that is learner dependent.
  4. There needs to be one page per learner (I can control this by using slightly different versions of this report that would work based on the number of components per learner.

The design I created for the report can be seen here. This is the design that should work for any learner who has passed 1 to 4 components.

However, this does not work, because, depending on the number of components the learner has achieved, the data at the bottom is pushed down.

I thought I might be able to solve this by putting the image at the background of the whole report per page, and then put a header and footer in with the data that is learner specific. But this does not work either because it is not possible it seems to have a background image that covers the whole report page, including a header and future. And the other problem is that there is a learner specific number (the statement number) that should go in the future, and I don't think I can put dataset data like that in the footer.

I also thought of splitting the background image in 3 parts, one each for the header, footer and body. But then I run into the same problem because I still need to get the learner specific statement number in the footer.

Another solution was to maybe have a fixed set of rows (partly invisible) in the list of components, to force the height of this list, but this does not really work either, because some titles of the components will be longer than the width of the page and wrap and take up two lines of text. Some others may not. So I don't know the height of each component line.

Is this possible at all in SSRS? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution

  • Try creating a rectangle in the space that will be taken by the components list.

    Then cut the current text box containing your expression, click the rectangle then paste inside it. This will ensure that the rectangle is the container for the textbox.

    Then, in Report Properties, set ConsumeContainerWhiteSpace to True. This should allow the textbox to grow within the rectangle