SSRS 2005: Frozen Horizontal Scrollbar on Wide Report

Question

Greetings all, and thank you for viewing my post.  

Over 2 years ago I implemented a SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 report environment on a VPN network on behalf of a government agency.  The implementation includes an ordinary SSRS report that is 96 inches wide in the design environment. (I know that might not sound like good design, but the client wanted it that way.)
The version is SSRS 2005 9.00.5057, which I understand is SP4 + KB2494120.

There had been no complaints about the report until very recently.  The chief complaint is that when this report renders in IE, the horizontal scrollbar fills 100% of the width of the browser page and thus can't be dragged left or right.  

From my end this had been an occasional annoyance but there was always a workaround, which was to slowly resize the width of the IE browser.  As I would drag IE's right border inward, the scrollbar alternated between being 100% wide (frozen) and normal.  Thus dragging it just a little bit inward would fix it.  The IE browser must be in Windows "restore" mode (not maximized or minimized) for this to work.  We don't have the problem at all in Firefox.

However, the clients report that the dragging method doesn't work at all for them. The frozen scrollbar entirely prevents them from navigating the report left-to-right.  And they are not permitted to use Firefox.  

I've considered creating a ReportView control that allows the developer to more precisely control scrolling and other elements of rendering the report.  I'm hoping I don't have to resort to that, since the functionality of the report is really simple (the body consists of a table and two header text boxes with header information.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Charles,

I am unable to reproduce the issue in my test environment. Here are several suggestions for your reference:

• Try the Internet Explorer Compatibility View mode. If it works, you can check the “Display intranet sites in Compatibility view” option in the Compatibility View Settings dialog box of the IE.
• If possible, adjust the width of the report to avoid the horizontal scrollbar when the IE is in Maximize mode. If it is a matrix in the report body, you can add column page breaks into the matrix. For more information, please see:
  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-GB/sqlreportingservices/thread/32f28407-e1ca-457e-92fd-d292e32dde4e
• If the report is embedded in a Web Application, you can display the report in an Iframe or a ReportViewer control. For an iFrame, you can set fixed width and height for it. For the ReportViewer control, you can set the SizeToReportContent property to True, and the AsynchRendering property to False.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

---

Mike Yin
TechNet Community Support

Answer 2

Thank you for those tips, Mike.  Well I tried the compatibility view mode but that didn't help.  The 96-inch grid that makes the report so wide is a table object.  I may be able to convert it to a matrix although that would be a more labor intensive solution than I was hoping for.  Likewise about creating a ReportViewer control or Iframe -- since the report is not embedded (it's a stand-alone browser report), that would be a bit of a development effort and not sure if it will resolve the issue.  Regards, Charles

Answer 3

Meanwhile, the report from the end users is that they have gotten the hang of slowly dragging the width of the IE browser until the scrollbar cooperates.  As long as they can do that, that workaround will probably suffice.