Recently I was troubleshooting a report issue where in one of the column was empty in the report. I started by checking the report body to ensure that the corresponding column was called appropriately, then looked into the dataset fields to see whether there was any mapping issue. Both of them looked good.

I thought the dataset query might be the culprit, returning empty value for that column. But running the query in SSMS returned correct values in the column. After half-an-hour or so, I accidentally stumbled on the reason.

When I clicked on the column name in the dataset fields list I could see an extra space.

See the gap between the “d” and the cursor. That was the culprit.

In another instance, I had an issue with providing default value for the parameter whose data type was float. I gave 1234567890, but it had considered it as 1234568000.

BIDS converted this into float (as below)

When I printed this parameter, I got the value as 1234568000 not my original value. However when I changed the default value into expression, it worked fine. i.e. as below