We ran into an interesting problem today.

A matrix report in SSRS (sqlserver reporting services) 2008 would work just fine when previewing it in VS, and would work fine when viewed directly on the reporting server.  But, if you view it through a asp.net reportviewer control, it would just show the header, a big blank space, and then the footer.

This only happens if you have Vertical text for the row headers.  Remove that and everything is OK.

I began editing the generated CSS/HTML and found that the cells had a number of styles applied, but specifically the one that seemed to break everything was:

WIDTH:100%;

Remove that and the page rendered as expected.

We tried changing a number of parameters to get it to remove the width style but no luck.

We have something that generates images with GDI to do it now, but it’s not ideal.