DynamicHeight Bug

The chart region in Reporting Services 2008 introduced the ability to dynamically size charts by setting the DynamicHeight and DynamicWidth properties, as Robert Bruckner explained in his blog. This feature is really useful and I hope one day it makes to the other regions as well. A customer recently reported an issue with their reports where regions would overlap when the report is previewed in Print Layout mode or exported to a hard page renderer, such as PDF. For example, in the report below the radar chart is positioned after the bar chart in RDL. However, in Print Layout preview the radar chart overlaps the bar chart. The customer tried every possible combination to enclose one or more regions in rectangles which helped avoiding the overlapping issue to some degree but introduced other issues.

After some digging, I discovered that the issue is caused by the fact that the bar chart is configured for dynamic height and managed to confirm that this is a bug. I will post an update when I learn more. Meanwhile, one possible workaround is to re-arrange the report so the region with dynamic height (hopefully, it’s only one) appears last on the report.

UPDATE (9/18/2010)

Robert Bruckner provided the following workaround which fixed the DynamicHeight issue for me:

1. Add a table with a single static cell (one row and one column).

2. Delete the table Details group.

3. Nest the chart in the table.