Table visual that automatically duplicates page of report to fit all rows.

[domagajack]

Hi everyone. I know this sounds weird, but maybe someone has any idea how to accomplish this:

- I have report getting various number of rows into table visual.

- The report is and has to be paginated (no longpage solution fits my organisations' needs)

- Depending on how many rows are there to display and content of those rows (if they fit within a line or x lines in a table), the table is only partly readable if exported to pdf. Portions of data are lost in comparison to viewing pbix file or using PowerBI service.

- I know the simplest solution is to abandon use of pdf for those reports. This cannot be met. Stakeholders only use PDFs and this cannot be changed.

I would love a table that can calculate the height of itself, the height of report page (with regards to:header, footer {set manually} and perhaps first-page visual height, that can be limited by other visuals. I mean the first page of the report that contains that table might have other visual above it, so table should be able to calculate what height it has on first page and new pages).

With this data, table would have to calculate first x rows that fit first page, then calculate next x rows for second page, and so on.

Then, it would have to duplicate the page(with name set as table's attribute), empty the copy of all visuals, insert itself (regarding header, footer set up as table's attributes) and display only that portion of rows that will fit in new table, without the previously shown ones...

I know that's a lot to ask, but to make it simple: Is it possible? What script can do it?

I am going to try develop this, but wanted to ask not to knock out open doors 🙂

Best

Jacek

[dm-p]

Hi @domagajack,

If you're looking to do this within a .pbix, then unfortunately not. They are not intended to be used in this way and there's no way of controlling the PDF output, as this is based on the rendered output. If you've thought about custom visuals as a possible approach, they can only calculate their own container's height and cannot inspect or observe elements outside this visual container (such as the report page).

Based on what you're asking for, paginated reports are pretty much an exact match:

Paginated reports are designed to be printed or shared. They're called paginated because they're formatted to fit well on a page. They display all the data in a table, even if the table spans multiple pages. They're also called pixel perfect because you can control their report page layout exactly. Power BI Report Builder is the standalone tool for authoring paginated reports. Paginated reports are based on the RDL report technology, long the standard report format in SQL Server Reporting Services.

To implement within the Power BI service, this will need a premium subscription, but does allow you to define how tables behave when they flow over a typical page length. These reports can be exported to PDF, and distributed via subscription as PDFs also.

Regards,

Daniel