SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Versus Browser Compatibility

Microsoft has released SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS) as server based report generation and development environment in 2004. It was released as SQL Server 2000 extension. SSRS has been released directly to the competition of Crystal Report and other Business Intelligence tools. The current version of SSRS is shipped with SQL Server 2005.

The file format of SSRS reports is .rdl. The RDL is XML. The RDL can be exported to PDF, XML, Excel, TIFF, CSV, HTML. Apart from this, you can call the report by simple URL.

Sounds Good…!!!!!

But, with all this coolest features of SSRS, there are plenty of bugs too. First ever bug I encounter is Browser Compatibility. There is pretty big issue with SSRS reports browser compatibility. The reports are best view in only IE6 and above. In this competitive world, we need to provide browser compatible websites. SSRS can be big hurdle in your website against browser compatibility.

We experienced a problem with the multivalue parameter dropdown in ReportViewer control in FireFox. It was working fine in IE. The calendar control and the multivalue dropdown was having problem. The problem caught me when I click on the calendar control, the calendar appears and then quickly disappeared before I can select anything. It was just in frequence of second. Wow, it was pretty quick and it became a challenging game for me to catch it. But Microsoft was very quick and I never could catch calendar.

The problem was with ReportViewer control provided by VS2005. When we call report directly in Firefox browser using report URL, it was working perfectly fine. So, finally we came to conclusion that, the problem is only due to ReportViewer control.

The solution to resolve the issue is very strange. We need to remove the DOCTYPE tag from the HTML. Removing DOCTYPE tag can create lots of issues with HTML and CSS layouts. But we have to rectify other issues.

Developers of ReportViewer control has used some nonstandard methods and attributes like onactive event. The page contains specific DOCTYPE, will not parse such events. We tried to use other DTDs like, HTML 4.0 and HTML 5.0 but nothing help. Finally we removed the DOCTYPE and problem get solve (And other design related problem start arising).

For more in SSRS please visit Paresh Jagatiya’s Weblog.

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