I'm designing new reports using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services these days and I have experienced an error message a few times during the deployment of these Reporting Services reports and I wanted to share what I learnt from these messages with you.
The error message I'm getting from Visual Studio 2005 IDE is as follows:
[rsInvalidFixedTableColumnHeaderSpacing] The table ‘table1’ includes improperly placed columns with FixedHeader set to true. These columns must be side-by-side, must start with either the left-most or right-most table column, and cannot be applied to all columns on the table.
First, the error I'm getting occurs generally in reports that includes a table in its design.
Second, I got the error generally after I add new columns to the table.
Let's start with investigating what is FixedHeader.
FixedHeader is a new enhancement in Reporting Services 2005. FixedHeader property set to True means setting a header to remain visible on the page during scroll operations that continue off the page.
This means you have column headers fixed while you are scrolling down the page. And you have those columns with column headers and column values fixed while you are scrolling to the right of the screen. Nice but you have values overlapped while scrolling.
If you click on a table column and check the FixedHeader property in the Layout section in Properties window, you will see a boolean value True or False.
If you have a pattern like True, False, True, False, True, etc. containing True values not side by side then you will have the above error message from VS2005 during deployment.
Also it is not allowed to set all the columns to have the FixedHeader property equal to True. You will face the same exception from the IDE during the deployment. Notice the message for the "cannot be applied to all columns on the table" part.
When I select all columns except the one which is most right outer of the table and set the FixedHeader property to True, after deployment the report displayed javascript error messages.
'children.0.style' is null or not an object
This is strange. Since when I set two columns with FixedHeader equal to False, the report run without a problem and displaying headers and columns selected fixed.
If you are planning to use FixedHeader choose your fix columns in the direction of writing which is generally beginning from left to right.