SSRS report with multi-column content and fixed dimensions

I need to design a report that has some very specific requirements that I am having problems with.

The report needs to have fixed margins at the top and bottom (to allow for pre-printed content on paper开发者_运维技巧). In the body of the report, there needs to be two seperate columns of data (student information). Below this, there needs to be a section that will contain information that will wrap to a new column depending on its length (student course and grade information). In addition, the course/grade information cannot break up a given academic year. Finally, there needs to be messages indicating "(End of Column)" and "(End of Transcript)."

Also, due to the nature of the data, I currently have the different sections of the report broken into sub-reports.

What would be the best way to design this report?

You can use a Tablix to allow your data to be displayed in two columns.

For the rows in the tablix you can leave "CanGrow" as "true" to ensure that it wraps and you will need to set grouping on your datasource based upon year.

You may need to set up a new field in your database that is set to only the year, then you can create a group on that field in your report. If this is SQL Server, you can add the following to the end of the "SELECT" statement before the "FROM" statememt

,DATEPART(YEAR,DateField) AS Year

For "End of column" and "End of Transcript" you will use grouping. You can set group headers and footers to display messages as required.

tutorial on setting up groups:

http://database.blogs.webucator.com/2010/09/10/add-format-and-grouping-to-a-report-in-sql-server-reporting-services-2008/

Update in response to op comments:

In addition, you can use expressions in to group on for data, so you can probably group with the following expression:

=FORMAT(Parameters!YearField.Value,"yyyy")