hello all,
Hoping someone who may have already built something similar can help me with an SSRS issue. I am having trouble articulating it, so haven't been able to find a solution in the usual places (stack overflow, etc).
Basically, using a combination of order, booking, and custom data, I need to create a report that resembles a daily calendar view in outlook, with the appointment box stretching from the start time to end time. I've already got a good basic calendar set up (table nested in a matrix in SSRS), but everything is only listed by start time. I want it to be visually obvious where the overlap is. My custom proc includes end time data as well, so it's available, I just don't know how to do it
Anyone have any ideas?
Sheila
Hi Sheila,
We've ran into this problem as well. We happened to be in a Tessitura project at the time and they created a calendar report based on some resource scheduling. Unfortunately, this is also a matrix style report and because of this, it doesn't look neat and tidy. From what I've seen and know, the best bet for a calendar is doing a C#/PHP based one in a web environment.
Ok, turns out I was able to use a range column chart with reversed axes to do everything I want-- I'll leave this here in case it comes up for anyone else.
Sheila Kearney Miller said:I need to create a report that resembles a daily calendar view in outlook, with the appointment box stretching from the start time to end time.
A big challenge in SSRS. Calendars in general are tough in SSRS, since it wants to widen and lengthen things as per the data it is enclosing, which will sprawl your page in all directions and make the whole thing unprintable, if not unreadable.
The closest I got to getting something like this to work was to create a fixed table seven columns wide by six rows high, filling the days as per the month in question, graying out the unused days, etc.. Tedious, and it didn't solve the "I want it to be visually obvious where the overlap is" issue. We never rolled it out.
Thanks for the feedback, Troy Nelson and Chris Jensen.
Chris, what you're describing is sort of similar to how I do monthly calendar reports in SSRS. I make a 5 x 7 matrix, grouped by week of month vertically, and day of week horizontally, and then insert a multi-row table INTO the data area of the matrix for the actual appointments-- this keeps it looking tidier, for sure, and allows for multiple appointments each day. For a monthly calendar, it works quite well.
What I ended up doing for this daily view that I wanted (Troy, like you, I was doing this for some resource scheduling) was to create a range column chart in BIDS, and display the data labels for each bar. Then I reformatted the labels to contain the actual data I was after, widened the columns, and reformatted them to make the draw side-by-side attribute false. I made the x-axis the spaces, and the y-axis the start time, and then reversed the data so it displayed in the order I wanted.
That all sounds kind of convoluted, but in the end, it did pretty much exactly what I wanted, so I am happy with it. Here's a little screenshot to give you an idea of how it turned out.
Thanks again!