So by now you've probably noticed problems with paging and conditional visibility on grouping in your SQL Server Reporting Services (2000, 2005) reports. Once you make a table row conditionally visible, paging goes out the window. So a 50,000 row report will render in a single page. Try scrolling through that and you'll give your mouse a major workout.
The only workaround is to have a footer row, or detail row that is set to Hidden=False so it will always display. You can set the row to be a height of 0, and then Paging will work. However, if you set this row to Hidden=True paging will NOT work.
Ok, so you can deal with .0325in spacing in between each group (SSRS does not allow a height of 0.0in anywhere, 0.325 is the minimum). The new problem is that the HTML rendering in the Report Viewer expands this row to full height, so even though your designer looks good the output in HTML will have unusually large whitespace between each row.
So there’s a choice that needs to be made...deal with the extra whitespace, or don't get built-in paging in the HTML viewer. The other adverse effect is that an export to Excel will result in extra blank rows between each group. Oddly enough, an export to PDF will display nicely.
In the end however, I would opt for the paging since it is quite possible to furnish a long list of results to the end user. This could take a looooong time to download to the browser and in the worst case could even time out.
