Long text in report

[Olaf Meyer]

Hello,

currently I'm evaluating the Telerik Reporting. During my test I observed many emty pages in a report. It seems that the text is not displayed if it contains more than 32490 characters even though the space for the text is reserved (empty pages).

During my evaluation it turned out, that the Telerik Reporting is a great reporting tool and I would like to use it to replace the current reporting solution in a cusomer project. However, since long text is heavily used in the customers application I would like to know whether this bug is known and if there are any plans to fix it in the next time. Is there any workaround?

Best Regards
Olaf

[George]

check  the KeepTogether Property. If it's set to TRUE the report engine will try to keep it on the same page.
Setting it to FALSE might fix your problem.

[Olaf Meyer]

Thanks for your answer. Setting the KeepTogether property to false doesn't help. I tried to set the MultiLine property to false, so only the first part of the text should be displayd. However, the text field still remains empty for long text ( > 32490 chars).

For further info: Displaying the text in HTML view works fine.

[Steve]

Hi Olaf Meyer,

Honestly there is no actual limit for the maximum number of chars that the TextBox item can handle, but as with everything we suspect that with much longer data (e.g. > 500 000), there might be problems.
Anyway reading your description of the problem, we do not believe it has to do with the number of chars. In fact there is a KB article (Telerik Reporting renders blank pages) listing know reasons for generated blank pages and ways to detect them. Please review it and let us know of your findings.
If still having problems, provide more info about exact item used (TextBox or HtmlTextBox), are these items part of the report or in a Table/Crosstab/List?

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Olaf Meyer]

Hello Steve,

I checked everything described in the article about blank page rendering. Unfortunately nothing helps. The problem is still there.
I wrote a very simple sample to reproduce the behaviour. You can download it from our web server:
http://www.systecs.com/Telerik/Test.zip

There's also a screenshot available:
http://www.systecs.com/Telerik/Report1.JPG

Best Regards
Olaf

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Olaf Meyer,

Indeed there seems to be some kind of limitation when rendering so long text in meta file at once (if you export to PDF or TIFF, you will see the text rendered just fine). And the Win viewer report surface uses a metafile.

The good news is that after the Q3 release we've changed the rendering algorithm to render the text fitting on each page separately. So I suggest using the latest internal build of our product. We have tested your sample with it and it renders as expected.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

All the best,
Milen
the Telerik team

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[Olaf Meyer]

Hello,

thank you very much for your support. I tried the latest internal build and the sample worked as expected. However, I run into the next problem when rendering text longer than 65535 chars. I get an GDI+ error: "A generic error occurred in GDI+." (see attach JPEG).


Best Regards
Olaf

[Milen | Product Manager @DX]

Hello Olaf,

There is a known limitation of the .NET Framework that does not allow a string containing more than 65535 characters on a single line to be measured.

Since there is no valid reporting use case for showing that many characters without line breaks currently we do not implement any work around of the specified issue.

Find attached a modified version of your report which renders more than 100 000 chars successfully when there are no more than the specified chars in a row without line breaks.

Regards,
Milen
the Telerik team

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[Olaf Meyer]

Hello Milen,

yes, you are right, it's not really a use case, but sometimes people have strange data in their database and the application must be able to handle this. I wasn't be aware of that limitation in GDI+ so I didn't add any line breaks to my test. However, since Telerik Reporting provides full access to the data I could add line breaks programmatically if needed.

Thanks again for your help.

Best Regards
Olaf