Fixing Indicator Images

Indicators, a new feature of Reporting Services 2008 R2, let you show images for state values on your reports and avoid using custom images and expressions. Sean Boon’s recent blog shows you how to scale the indicator images. One annoying issue business users reported when working with indicators is that the indicator image stretches if the text grows and spills to the next row. For example, on the report below the second row spans two lines and its indicator images are stretched vertically.

Unfortunately, the indicator region doesn’t have a property to “fix” the image size. The only workaround for now is to enclose the entire indicator region in a rectangle: a kludgy hack especially for business users.