Reporting Services 2008 report always shows in Report Viewer 9.0 as having 1 page, but prints as 2 pages

Question

My ASP.NET site uses Report Viewer 9.0 to run reports from a Reporting Services 2008 R2 server. For most reports, Report Viewer accurately shows the number of pages a report will print on (i.e. in its paging fields in the header). However, there is one report which always shows as using only 1 page, whereas it always prints as 2 pages.

(This might found like a trivial issue as there is no impact on actual printing, but its one of those things "the client finds confusing" so has to be investigated :) ).

Some details:

• All the reports that show accurate page counts are fairly simple "record list" style reports - based on one/more tablixes, with texboxes for titles
• The one report with a problem is a 2 page "customer invoice", constructed as follows:
• The dataset is a single record containing details of an order (customer name, order date etc)
• The report is built from 2 rectangles arranged vertically, with both being the exact width and height to fit on 1 A4 page (19cm x 27.7cm which allows for a 1cm margin on the report)
• There are no "automatic page break" properties set on any controls (e.g. page break after rectangle #1). This hasn't been necessary as the sizing of the rectangles makes the report print perfectly on 2 pages.
• (This is probably irrelevant) Each rectangle's visibility can be toggled by a boolean report parameter - "Print page #1" & "Print page #2". This also works fine for controlling which of the pages print.

I do not want to set the "automatic page break" on either rectangle as this would cause blank pages to print if the report parameters caused one or other rectangles to be hidden.

What else can I do to make Report Viewer realise there are 2 pages?

Edit: its not an issue with just Report Viewer - the SSRS Report Manager shows the report as 1 page, and so does Visual Studio Report Designer when previewing the report. Both however show 2 pages when doing a Print Preview.

Answer 1

In some cases this may be caused by the fact that the PageCountMode defaults to Estimate.

As far as I knew you can't do much about that in ReportViewer 9.0 connecting to a 2008 report server. The only solution I knew of is upgrading to 10.0. However, in this social.msdn thread they suggest adding the TotalPages global to a header (presumably to force an actual count?). I haven't tried this myself, but it may help you solve the issue.