Chris May

When working with a SSRS report, the report framework will already "Denull" everything.  But in some cases, for example when you are working with numbers, you might want to display a value in lue of the "" that is displayed for nulls.

Now you would THINK, that they would just use the same ISNULL syntax that everyone knows from sql programming.

HAHAHHAHA... of course they didn't do that.

Instead you have to use a combo of IIF and IsNothing like so:

=IIF(IsNothing(Fields!Quantity.Value),0,Fields!Quantity.Value)

It isn't THAT big of a pain, but I wish MS would sometimes just realize how much easier it would be for them to just create an IsNull function in their own codebase than make their users write this out.

Oh well.  I guess when it comes to problems with SSRS, this is waaaaaaayyyyy down my list.

Speaking of "my problems with SSRS"... when are you guys going to support TBLR text??  Drives me nuts.  Everyone does "vertical text" in TBLR format, for pretty much every application, but now in SSRS you are forced to use TBRL.  When you give these reports to engineers that is the very first thing they say "You need to turn this text around the other way".... yes I know, I got my degree in Civil Engineering with a focus on structure design, so when you come from a background of seeing all vertical text (like on any plans) as ALWAYS, by requirement, aligned in a TBLR manner, and then you are forced to cock your head the other way to read it, it is really a pain.

But I guess I would still like to see MS fix their *terrible* PDF rendering first.  I just LOVE watching my reports take 4x as long as in CR, and end up 100x bigger in file size than they are after being saved in acrobat (15 MB for a 1 page PDF, open in Acrobat, save the file again, down to 150KB, with no visible change in appearance or quality).