SSRS Linked Reports and Custom Report Print Properties

I am blogging about an issue that has been around for a while but I believe hasn’t been made quite known enough.

I have printed from linked reports in situations where custom report print formats were not required and thus never had an inkling of its potential bugs. So naturally after several hours of amending column width, font sizes and formats to squeeze a large report for A3 print jobs; it was interesting ( I thought several hours of changes had been lost with source safe J ) to find that linked reports in Reporting Services did not keep report parameters that have been applied to the master report.

Investigating the issue further it seems that the page width and height properties are not replicated to the linked report. This has been seen in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 R2.

Microsoft seem quite aware of this and advise setting the properties via a custom script.

http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/162129/linked-reports-do-not-honour-page-margins

One would hope it would be rectified in Denali, only reproducing this in CTP1 left a lot to be desired as the problem still persists.