SSRS report losses formatting in Report Manager via Internet Explorer
I have a report that renders a report header on its own page and then two pages for each member that it finds. The report will render each page correctly for the report header and the first member listed but all formatting is lost when the page changes to the second member (page 4 overall). Once this happens all formatting is lost for the entire report: right aligned becomes left, tablix table loses boarders, font changes, etc. It looks very much like when a webpage loses connection to it CSS file. When I navigate back to the first member the formatting is lost here as well and I cannot navigate back to the report header page. I have to navigate back to page two then back to page one twice for the report header page to reappear.
To make things more complicate the report renders as expected in BIDS, report Builder 3.0 and Firefox. The report has worked before from the Report Manager via Internet Explorer (IE) and only recently started to fail. There have only been minor changes since it last ran well form Report Manager via IE and I have investigated them all. I ran copies of the source from both IE and Firefox through an html validator at W3 Schools and they both had the same exact errors that is typical of Microsoft rendered XHTML. The interesting issues is when you have the failed formatted report rendered in Report Manager via IE and then choose to export the file as a PDF or MHTML the exports render the same as expected when looking at BIDS or Report Builder 3.0 including the MHTML viewed via IE.
I really have no idea how to solve this issue and have tried many different approaches to resolve. Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Answer
I just observed similar behavior where my report rendered fine in BIDS, but when deployed to reporting services (2008R2), it rendered incorrectly. In my case, after looking at 2 pages of the report, the third page lost all formatting. Then when I went back to pages 1 and 2, the formatting was lost as well.
The change I made that caused this behavior was very simple. I set the Hidden property for the same text box back to True.
The fix was to do the opposite, set the Hidden property for a text box back to False. In order to hide the box, I changed the font color to match the page background color. This set of workarounds worked for me. The loss of formatting definitely appears to be a bug in the rendering engine of reporting services.