Alternate pages will appear blank on Reports created in Reporting Service 2008 / R2 when exported to Image / PDF / Print

I was recently working on an intersting issue where you'll see blank pages on alternate pages when the report is exported to PDF / Image / Print. I was checking the usual formula of,

Width of the report body + left margin + right margin < Report page width (8.5 IN in Portrait page orientation).

Everything was absolutely normal and still i was seeing the issue.

The report was a very simple one with just one matrix. The width of the matrix was around 3.5 Inches.

One interesting thing was if i increase the report page width from 8.5 to 13.5 (which is much bigger than the Landscape page orientation) then the blank pages disappear.

But the above workaround is not acceptable. So what else you can check?

In Reporting Service 2008 / R2 we've introduced a new Page level property called ConsumeContainerWhitespace, which is by default False.

REF: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee224246.aspx

What does that mean?

This means that RS will preserve the minimum whitespace between contents and containers, such as the Body. In my scenario the only item in the Body is the Tablix, so the minimum horizontal whitespace is between the right edge of the Tablix and the right edge of the Body, and it is very wide (i.e Width of Page = 8.5in - Width of Tablix = 3.5 in). RS preserves this (5in) whitespace, causing each page to spill over onto a second page horizontally.

 The better way to fix this scenario:

Set ConsumeContainerWhitespace = True, which means that RS will consume all whitespace between contents and containers.

HTH!

Selva

[The post is AS-IS and doesn't carry any warranty]