SSRS 2008 Header height issues due to merged columns

Question

When working on a report today we ran into an issue which took us quite some testing to figure out. At some point we decided to switch some of the headers of columns around and when rendering the report again it for some reason created a header which was
way heigher then the biggest text there, showing a huge empty space in the header underneath the text.
My first guess was that there had to be some extra spaces in some column or something alike, which made the cells grow so much. This however was not the case. As a next step I cleared the cells in the headerrow one by one to figure out which field was making
the header grow this much. It turned out to be the header in the 10th column. When I replaced the text in this cell, it did not make the header grow anymore. When I put the original text back, it started growing again. As a next step I removed the text in
this cell, pasted it in another cell (column 11) and rendered the report, with the same huge header again. Out of frustration I tried a desperate last move, copied it to column 1 and rendered the report, the effect was a small header without some weird height.
So the conclusion was that this text was making the header grow hugely in the columns 10 and 11, but not in column 1? What is the difference between column 10/11 and column 1?
Then I noticed that column 7, 8 and 9 were pretty small columns, only holding integer values. The header above this, however, was one word, so the 3 cells in the header for these columns were MERGED. So basicly, only looking at the cells in the header, my
huge text was in the 8th cell from the left, not the 10th (10th column, but due to merging the 8th cell). As a test I editted the width of the 8th column (the middle one of the merged cells) to be as wide as all the other columns holding text. The rendering
of the report, with the huge text in the original headercolumn, now did not grow my header to be extremely big. This combined with the way "hiding" works in SSRS 2008 oppose to SSRS 2005 (ie, in 2008 a hidden cell disappears completly, moving all next cells
up to the left, where as in 2005 a hidden cell just shows as empty in the report), leads me to believe that there is a bug in SSRS 2008 considering cell widths and merged cells? It is like the 10th column header now thinks it is part of the 8th column (being
the 8th cell in its row due to merging) and therefor works with the width of this 8th column to judge how much increased height it needs. In fact it is the width of the 10th column and therefor doesnt need the height it creates, resulting in a huge empty space
underneath the text.
Is this a known issue by Microsoft? Any ETA on this for a fix?

Answer 1

This combined with the way "hiding" works in SSRS 2008 oppose to SSRS 2005 (ie, in 2008 a hidden cell disappears completly, moving all next cells up to the left, where as in 2005 a hidden cell just shows as empty in the report), leads me to believe that
there is a bug in SSRS 2008 considering cell widths and merged cells?
Hi Joel_i,
I was a little confused with the paragraph above. Could you please elaborate it?
Based on the information posted, I tried to reproduce the scenario, but it works fine. During my test, the header cells grow
only when the text in the head column is too long which will caused newline, or there is some extra space in some columns. So, you might need to check the properties of the 8^th column cell, such asSpaceAfer,
SpaceBefore, to make sure all properties are set rightly.
To provide you further assistance, could you please post the report and dataset with sample data to our data collection E-mail
address?
E-mail: sqltnsp AT microsoft.com (Please replace the AT with @, and remove additional spaces).
Thanks,
Lola Wang
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