Plain Text Rendering - Again!

Hello List,



sorry to raise this again here. I have seen a lot of posts on this board about plain text rendering but never really a satisfactory answer. So my question is: Has anyone succeeded in developing a custom rendering extension which is able to render a report as plain text?

I am a Technical Lead in a project to convert and migrate reporting from Unix/C to Reporting Services 2005. One requirement is, to render the reports in plain text for archiving purposes. I know that there are a million options out there to archive in PDF and whatever. Well, we need plain text. No way around it! It is a governmental requirement!

I am about to pull the plug on SSRS 2005 just because we are not able to fulfill this requirement. And we are talking about a big project converting >700 reports!


Challenges we are facing:


Reporting components are rendered as they appear in a compnent list, one after each other. If you now have two multiline components side by side, i.e. two lists, the first list component in the array gets rendered and then the other. This makes it almost impossible to render the lines in those two components side by side. In the sample below, the Report Header would be rendered, then the Address block, then the Other Data block, then the Order History Table and then the Account Statement table.

Positioning of text boxes is almost impossible. We are able to find out how many centimeters/inches/millimeters/points a control is located from the left border. But how can we translate this into i.e. how many spaces will we need to add for padding?

The column width can't be determined. SSRS adds a line break if the cell text is longer than the column width.


We have reports which look something like this:



Code Block


Code Block

REPORT NAME

MANAGER NAME


ACCOUNT
REPORT DATE






First Name: XXXXXXXXXXXX Other Data: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Last Name: XXXXXXXXXXXX More Data: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Address: XXXXXXXXXXXX More Data: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
City: XXXXXXXXXXXX

Order History Account Statement

XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX




I also got some advice that SSRS is probably the wrong tool. And I also read this in some of the "Plain Text" posts here. And I am actually surprised about this. People suggest to look for some other tool and not use i.e. email subscrptions, other rendering formats, SSRS security model, snapshot history, report models and all the other goodies only because we can't render in simple text?

If anyone has any information to share, I would very much appreciate it. We also looked at third party tools and plug ins but couldn't find any! If anyone knows of a company who would be able to help us, let me know!

I really would love to pull this project off with SSRS 2005 because I Iike the technology and SSRS provides a lot of functionality we want to leverage. I believe SSRS is the right tool for us and it covers 95% of our business requirements! But at this stage it doesn't look very rosy! Because of the Plain Text rendering!

Cheers

Peter