How to display "no data" message in report?

[Laura Middleton]

I created a report containing a single crosstab.  Is it possible to show a "no data exists" message either inside the empty crosstab or in a textbox elsewhere in the report if the query returns no data?

I'm very familiar with Microsoft Reporting Services where you can set a textbox's visbility based on whether or not a dataset is empty. That textbox would contain the "no data exists" message.  Can I do something like this or display a message right inside the crosstab? 

Thanks for your help.

[Steve]

Hello Laura,

You can achieve the same effect in Telerik Reporting by using Conditional Formatting. Another approach is to handle the ItemDataBound event of the Crosstab report item to check programmatically whether the current Crosstab contains no data, set its Visible property to false in such case or alter the visibility of the "additional textbox" that shows the "no data" message.

Hope this helps.

Sincerely yours,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Tim]

On the ItemDataBound event you can grab a reference to the control being databound (such as a table) and easily make it invisible, but is there a way to reference another control (such as a textbox), based on the reference to the table? For example, if the table had a 'tag' property which held the name of its related textbox, or even if you could grab the textbox by a string manipulation on the table name (like replace 'tbl' with 'txt', so that 'tblProducts' would become 'txtProducts' and you could then reference 'txtProducts' by its string name.

With reports, there doesn't seem to be any way to iterate through the controls on the report, or the datasources, or to reference a control by a text ID ( for example 'this["txtMessage"]', or 'this.controls["txtMessage"]' ). Nor is there any "No Data Template" for the Lists/Tables, so unless you create a switch/case statement based on the name of the table, you can't change other controls by using a generic helper function.

I want to have a global helper function for reports that is run on every table databound event (I have multiple databound tables on each report) and shows or hides the tables based on the row count, then shows or hides a textbox related to each table.

[Nandita]

Yes that's ok if you want to display that thing on the report itself. What if i want to display a message on the silverlight UI.

similarly how can i transfer the error from the reportview to the silverlight application?

[Massimiliano Bassili]

Nandita, the error handling of the report is for your eyes only i.e. only for the developer to see, and the error should never surface to the end user. This means - make sure all errors are handled accordingly, so no errors reach the users.

Cheers!

[Nandita]

But how do i make sure.. 

should i use try with empty catch block in the needDataSource event?

I don't think it is the correct view. How do i tell the user that the SQL server is down or the network is down or there is a time out due to congestion in the network.

We are handling every error to display in the RadWindow.Alert. for the end users.

I was showing this demo when suddently this error came which is in the attached file. Had there been some fault contract or something attached to your report service, we would have captured it and this won't have happened.

Please give some solution.

[Rajashree]

Can you show how to implement this programmatically?? What condition should be placed to checkif data it rturned or not. I have used Items.Count in condition for table item but its not working.

[Stef]

Hi,

@Rajashree: You can use the Crosstab/Table/List item's NoDataMessage and NoDataStyle properties to set a message, when there is no data.

About error handling in reports, you can use the Report.Error event to catch exceptions, cancel the further processing and throw your custom exception that will be displayed in the viewer, or perform other custom error logging and handling logic.

Regards,
Stef
Telerik

[Rajashree]

Well. I had done that. But nothing happened. My table item was not seen but even No Data Message was not seen to. I had even provided appropriate style.

[Nasko]

Hello Rajashree,

The described issue is not reproducible at our end. We tested our Crosstab/ProductSales project by setting the Crosstab.NoDataMessage and making its data source to has zero records.

Thus, it would be of great help for us if you can open a support ticket, where you can zip and attach a sample report definition exhibiting the described issue. Once we review it, we would be able to provide you with more information.

Regards,
Nasko
Telerik

[Rajashree]

Sorry for the inconvinence. But the property worked.