Suppress chart line conditionally?

Question

I am using SSRS 2005.  I have a chart for the financial people that includes an "amount frozen" line.  If the amount frozen is 0, I don't want to show the data line at all - not on the chart, nor on the legend.  But if it a non-zero value I want it to show up.

(Additionally there is a text box that I want to surpress, but that is easy to do with an if statment in the Visibility/Hidden property.) 

Is there a way to do this short of having two separate reports?

Thanks!
Beverley

Answer 1

No one?  Oh well... two reports it is.... 

I wouldn't mind an answer to this one even though I'm doing a workaround, if anyone knows!  I'm sure it'll come up again in the future, knowing the people I work with!  :)

Answer 2

The visibility property only applies to the report item (chart) in SSRS 2005.  If you are using SSRS 2008, then the data series themselves have a visibility property that you could take advantage of.

-Sean

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Program Manager, SQL Server Reporting Services This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. http://blogs.msdn.com/seanboon http://www.twitter.com/ssrs

Answer 3

Beverly, I can provide a partial solution. In your chart, change the expression for the data value of "amount frozen" to an IIF() evaluation like this:
=iif(Sum(Fields!AMOUNT_FROZEN.Value)=0,nothing,Sum(Fields!AMOUNT_FROZEN.Value))

Based on this approach, the line will not appear on the chart when the value = 0.

It will still appear on the legend, though. I strongly recommend, however, that you avoid using legends if at all possible. If you must have a legend, there are ways to create a custom legend that actually resides/displays in a table. Using this custom approach, I believe you could then suppress, conditionally, the "amount frozen" row.

FYI -- Since you're trying to chart data, please check out Stephen Few's website http://www.perceptualedge.com -- he is a visual analytics expert. Great ideas for graphing data.

Hope that helps,
Pete

Answer 4

Thanks Pete, that'll fix it!