Often when designing a report you may find a need to concatenate values in an expression. For example, you want a column with full names but your data source has names stored separately for first name and last name. Easy enough you can write an expression like this:
=Fields!FirstName.Value + " " + Fields!LastName.Value
Problem solved right? Well let's complicate things a little. Let's say you not only want the full names but all addresses as well but you don't want it on the same line. You need a carriage return so it looks like a normal address:
Devin Knight
123 Main Street
Jacksonville, FL 12345
As many times as I've used carriage return in reporting services I always seem to forget the syntax for it and have to go search for it. That's usually the purpose for me writing blogs!
Using the VbCrLf function I can get my line feed. It's a call the VB for carriage return and line feed. Here's the syntax to get my name and address like I need:
=Fields!FirstName.Value + " " + Fields!LastName.Value + VbCrLf +
Fields!Address.Value + VbCrLf +
Fields!City.Value + ", " + Fields!StateProvinceName.Value + " " + Fields!PostalCode.Value