Report Viewer render as pdf layout issues

Question

We have a web application with several hundred quite complicated RDL reports. All of them are displayed correct, but when we export them to PDF, some of the reports have overlapping areas (where multiple labels that should be down of each other overlap instead). We build the reports in the same form as we display them, except that we call in the end

report.Render("PDF", deviceinfo) 

where deviceinfo has the exact same configuration. It seems that the export to PDF functionality gets confused with some of the tablix inside the report definition. The same error happens when we export a report directly from report viewer in the web app.

Are there additional settings to consider or why is it possible that rendering to pdf shows different results than displaying with same data and layout? Has anybody experience in this?

BTW: when I export it as Word document, it is shown correct.

Answer 1

That's what we found out:

ReportViewer has some tolerance when two tablix overlap, the second tablix is moved down, just below of the first. That's how it would have been intended by design. So we never had an issue with the buggy definition. Rendering it to PDF on the other side is absolute strict and tablix will overlap in output. The only solution was to go throw our files and correct them, so that they are shown as before in Report Viewer but are also rendered correct.

There is no special configuration for printing view or layout.