I'm are glad to announce that the current version of Enesys RS Data Extension is compatible with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 Release Candidate 0.
In this release, the long awaited support for HTML tags has been added.
I though it would be interesting to provide you with the results of some tests I have made.
I created a list on purpose and added an item containing various formatting options. Here is how the list displays when browsing the Sharepoint.
I have built a very simple report for displaying the list items. The report's query is very basic and does not include a stripHtml attribute (stripHtml attribute could have been set to false as well):
In order to interpret the tags as HTML styles, you will need to change the markup type as shown in the following screen shot:
And here is the final result when the report is run :
Obviously, this is not yet perfect though promising:
Tables, underlined text and indented text are not displayed properly. I hope, support for table will be rapidly added as this is quite common to use them for enhancing data presentation.
Images are not displayed at all but this was expected due to the report's credentials context that may not allowed access to specified images.
An annoying problem is the fact that Rich text field's SharePoint html editor inserts the following tags
when hitting Enter to insert a line feed. Unfortunately, those tags are discarded so that empty lines are removed from the final result. I'm not sure Microsoft will change this behavior and I guess we will have to come up with some functions for automatically replacing those tags with a "br" tag.
For those who are not completely convinced, here is the same report when setting stripHtml attribute to true (note that in that case you will have to revert the markup type to None):
Do not hesitate to report any problem you may encounter when testing Enesys RS Data Extension with SSRS 2008.