The Power Of The Placeholder

Once upon a time in a Business Intelligence Development Studio 2005 Reporting Services solution there liveth a Textbox object which developers could use to put text on a report.  It was a fairly simple object, allowing only two ways of programming the text.

The first and most simple way of the two was to type plain and simple text directly into the box:

And the second, more advanced way, alloweth developers to use an expression to create the text dynamically.  With this they could combine data from several sources into the same Textbox:

Then developers realized that something was still missing.  Text could be created dynamically but they also wanted to optimize the way the text looketh.  So they selected part of the expression and tried to change some font properties.  But alas, they couldn’t.  It was all or nothing:

Then arriveth the day of the birth of the successor to BIDS 2005.  As the family’s tradition went, it was called the same as its parent.  The only difference was its birth year: BIDS 2008.

And developers started exploring BIDS 2008 and discovereth that the Textbox object had gotten an upgrade.  When editing the content of the textbox, the right-click menu has gotten a new item:

That’s right, Create Placeholder.  And this was the moment in time when developers started to have fun again.  The placeholder can be given a value through an expression, just like the olden days:

The Placeholder’s value can be given a format through the Number tab:

And a Placeholder’s font can be customized:

Now you may ask yourselves, wherein lies the difference with the olden days?

Well, it lies in the fact that several Placeholders and regular constant text can all be combined in the same Textbox!

This is what it looks like in Design time:

And rendered in Preview:

Powertip: to easily open up the properties of an existing Placeholder, single-click the Textbox to select it, again single-click to edit the content, then double-click a Placeholder to get its properties window.

When reports developed using BIDS 2005 are attached to a 2008 SSRS solution, any expressions in textboxes are acting as a placeholder as well:

And developers liveth happily ever after.

Although not entirely.  Try entering a chemical formula in the textbox.  Indeed, there’s no subscript option in the font settings.  And it doesn’t work through HTML either, as explained in this Microsoft Connect bug report.  It’s probably not as easy as it sounds, but if Word can do it I think so should SSRS.

Small update: a colleague recently had an interesting idea related to the subscript issue.  If subscript is not possible, try putting the numbers in a smaller font than the other characters.  So instead of H2O, it would become H2O.  The subscript version looks like this: H₂O.  The workaround doesn’t look as good as with subscript but better than just in regular font size.  (Thanks Bart )