Jan 2020 Power BI Report Server - paginated report rendering issues?

[messerjc]

I think we might be running into some version drift issues between the SSDT rendering engine vs PBIRS's rendering engine, and I'm curious if anyone else is seeing something similar? We develop our paginated reports in Visual Studio 2017 (ver 15.9.20), with Reporting Services Projects extension version 2.6.3. I don't have a good way to show it at the moment without exposing some data, but imagine a document map on the left, basic tablix on the right, with a simple header and text box. In Visual Studio, everything renders as expected. When deployed to PBIRS though, the left pane actually says "Document Map" on top with the document map data below. The tablix renders fine, but we're noticing that when clicking on any element in the tablix space, there is a dashed line "selection box" that pops up.

As we started looking at that more between different browsers, we noticed it's far worse in IE11 with dashed boxes showing up on-click for even individual table elements, and in Chrome and Chromium Edge, clicking in the tablix space draws the dashed selection box around the entire window, or sometimes just around the text header depending on where you click. We also noticed that a dashed box shows up around the +/- signs in the document map when interacting with those elements.

Anyone else seeing this behavior? We're not sure yet if this is due to some policy issue our company pushed out that's effecting browser rendering, or if this is a sign of what we're developing in Visual Studio with SSDT is just drifting more and more from how the PBIRS renderer is handling these elements.

[messerjc]

If it helps at all, it's essentially this issue, except that we're seeing it not in Power BI Desktop, but in existing, previously published paginated reports.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Dotted-Border-on-blank-desk-top/td-p/472106

[d_gosbell]

I'm seeing the same dotted "selection box" when clicking on report elements. My guess is that these are implemented in the report portal for accessibility reasons. You should find that you can use the tab key to navigate around on these elements. These will be added to the portal view so that people that cannot use a mouse and/or keyboard and have to use other input devices.

The default browser output has always had very minor variations between the preview and the various browsers. There are minor variations in the way the various browsers implement their layout engines, it's almost impossible to have html display identically across different browsers (and the preview window is most likely just an embedded browser of some sort, so probably some old version of the IE engine)

I don't believe the Power BI Desktop issue is the same thing, that was a static line they added to indicate the canvas boundary.

[messerjc]

Thanks for the response. 🙂  That makes sense to a degree, but if anyone finds an option to disable it I'd think we'd prefer to go that route. I'll have to try navigating around the elements via keyboard more and see how it behaves. That said, there does seem to be an issue with with drift between what we're able to develop in Visual Studio w/ SSDT and how the report ends up displaying on the server, so that's not great. It's a growing pet peeve of mine that the toolchain from paginated reports to Power BI reports is so increasingly different, and because of other company decisions we're unlikely to be in a position to use the PBI Service, so it may end up driving us into a different platform down the road. Blech. Lots of change going on in the industry...as always!