Displaying Tabs in SSRS Reports from Telerik RadEditor Content

Updated over 6 months ago

Environment

Product	Version
RadEditor for ASP.NET AJAX	Any

Description

When using the Telerik RadEditor to enter content that includes tabs, and saving this content in an MS-SQL database, the tabs are not visible in the generated SSRS reports. The RadEditor saves tabs in HTML format using the <span style="white-space:pre;"> </span> tag. However, the SSRS report does not render the tabs as expected.

This KB article also answers the following questions:

• How can I ensure that tabs from RadEditor content appear in SSRS reports?
• What method should I use to convert tabs into spaces for SSRS report visibility?
• Is there a way to make white-space preserved in HTML content visible in SSRS reports?

Solution

To resolve the issue of tabs not being displayed in SSRS reports, convert the tabs into a specific number of spaces before saving the content to the database. This conversion ensures that SSRS, which may not fully support the white-space: pre; CSS property, can correctly display the spaces in place of tabs.

Here is a step-by-step approach to replace tabs with spaces in the RadEditor's content:

1. Identify the HTML content in RadEditor that contains tabs. Usually, tabs are saved as <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> in HTML.

2. Choose the number of spaces you wish to use to represent a tab. Commonly, four non-breaking spaces ( ) are used.

3. Use the following code snippet to replace the tab representation in HTML with your chosen number of spaces:

csharp

// Assuming RadEditor1.Content contains the HTML content
// Define the replacement for the tab-span with a sequence of non-breaking spaces
string tabReplacement = "    "; // Example: 4 non-breaking spaces

// Replace each occurrence of the tab-span with the tabReplacement string
RadEditor1.Content = RadEditor1.Content.Replace("<span style=\"white-space: pre;\">	</span>", tabReplacement);

4. Save the modified content back to the database.

5. The SSRS report should now display the spaces in place of tabs, ensuring the formatting is preserved as intended.

Notes

• The solution provided here assumes that the RadEditor content is being processed server-side before being saved to the database.
• Adjust the number of non-breaking spaces based on your formatting requirements.

See Also

• RadEditor Overview
• StackOverflow Discussion on Displaying Tabs in SSRS