Tuesday, October 5, 2010

ReportViewer quirks with browsers other than IE

I'm using the .NET ReportViewer control to display report output. Today I found this control fully supports Internet Explorer, but has some quirks when used with other browsers.

Microsoft has documented this here. Also a shout-out to this post on stackoverflow that set me on the right track.

I've examined several aspects of ReportViewer's behavior in four browsers, all running on Windows:
- Internet Explorer 8
- Firefox 3.6.10
- Google Chrome 6.0.472.63
- Safari 5.0.2

Here's a rundown of the quirks I encountered...

1. You can set the width of ReportViewer's output by setting its ZoomMode and/or ZoomPercent properties.
- Works perfectly in IE.
- Totally ignored by FF. Output is always displayed at 100%.
- Works perfectly in Chrome.
- Mostly works in Safari, but width is greater than it should be.

2. The ReportViewer control is supposed to display a dropdown list so you can change the width of the output interactively.
- Works perfectly in IE.
- Not displayed in FF, Chrome or Safari.

3. The ReportViewer control displays several controls at the top of the report for pagination, exporting the report, etc. The way these controls are laid out varies by browser.
- In IE, they're left-justified on a single line.
- Ditto in FF.
- In Chrome, they're bunched up vertically in a narrow column.
- In Safari, they're similarly bunched up.

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