Displaying Tabs in SSRS Reports from Telerik RadEditor Content

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