SSRS 2008 & 2012 Some data not rendered when subreport is nested, but render to PDF works OK by Alan Schofield

The following issue shows in both our production environment (VS2008 and SQL2008 (not R2)) and my test environment (VS2010 and SQL 2012 dev edition). The issue is also present when running reports from the SSRS Server once deployed.

I have a series of sub reports which are nested up to about 4 levels deep.

The subreports are generally called from other sub reports which loop thru data repeating the report for each row found. For exmplae we have a 3 level category structure for product data. Umbrella/Super/Category.
A report will but run by the user for an Umbrella category, this will produce a report that contains a sub report for each relevant super category which in turn contains a report for each relevant category.

If I run the problem report on it's own, it runs fine, if I run the report nested 1 level from Visual Studio it works OK, at 2 levels deep the problem appears. Running the deployed report from the SSRS Server fails sometimes even at a single level of nesting.

Basically what happens is that the top row (column headers) render OK but the first row of data sometimes has the first cell blank. If I run the report, the un-rendered data is consistent (ie. the error shows i the same place every time, the same iteration of the subreport render). In one test I carried out, the sub-report is called 18 times within a single report, but only 4 times does it fail.

I know it's not a data issue as such as if I render to PDF it works perfectly, but rendering to screen, MHTML, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX all show the same problem.


Data, RDL's etc can be supplied if required.

Some screenshots are attached showing output to 4 different renderers. PDF shows the output correctly, the others do not.