Display unicode in Microsoft reporting

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After migrating from VB6 to Vb.NET over the last 12 months or so, I have started moving our legacy Crystal Reports 8.5 reports over into Microsoft Reporting (VS2015) - however, a lot of our reports display russian, chinese, arabic and other international character sets.

We're slowly moving over from SQL2000 (yes, its that old) onto a newer version of SQL Server once the project is completed but until then, I am having to migrate sections of the project over into .NET (im slowly learning C# while doing this) - but I have just hit a stumbling block on something I cant seem to get a solution from and that is (and I cant believe that its not supported straight off the bat so it HAS to be me) and that is MS Reporting not supporting Unicode for these other character sets. I have either missed something blindingly obvious with MSR or Microsoft have dropped a huge clanger.

I have tried changing the font (I have the standard fonts installed via Win10, which is my development OS) and tried MS Gothic UI and Segui UI - gothic had partial success, some of the chinese characters were converted but partial is not good enough. I dont seem to have MS Arial Unicode - just Arial but I would have thought these other "UI" named fonts would have supported it (I can get winforms to display those characters correctly in Datagridview so I know the font is supports what I need already).

So typically, my code calls an RDLC, sometimes with parameters, sometimes without. A sample of the code is below. SQL is injected through a dataset so it is dynamic within the application. I can view chinese/russian direct through SQL 2000's query viewer.

Dim ReportViewerScreen As New Reporting

                            ReportViewerScreen.Show()
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.ProcessingMode = Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ProcessingMode.Local
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.Reset()
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.LocalReport.DataSources.Clear()
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.LocalReport.ReportEmbeddedResource = "MyReport.rdlc"

                            Dim sReportDataSource = New Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportDataSource()
                            sReportDataSource.Name = "DataSet1"
                            sReportDataSource.Value = ds.Tables(0)
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.LocalReport.DataSources.Add(sReportDataSource)
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.LocalReport.EnableExternalImages = True
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.LocalReport.EnableHyperlinks = True

                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.RefreshReport()
                            ReportViewerScreen.ReportViewer1.Show()

I was hoping there would be some command or method that I have missed to get this working, 100% in any character set. The Ntext fields (and nvarchar) fields in SQL2000 have all had N' inserts/updates so I know the characters are correct (and visible) in SQL2000 as my previous statement above. Please help! Thanks

What I have tried:

changing fonts, googling unicode microsoft reporting support

Posted 30-Jan-18 0:19am

Member 12561559

Updated 6-Feb-18 21:41pm

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[no name] 30-Jan-18 8:38am

Please let us know to which version of sql server your migration is happening.

Richard Deeming 30-Jan-18 10:03am

Is your data stored as nvarchar, or as varchar with a specific collation?

Member 12561559 30-Jan-18 11:50am

nvarchar for small fields like names, ntext for larger blocks of texts (under 3000 chars) but in various languages, as far as collation, I presume its whatever is default (uk english). I just tried feed a manually pasted bit of chinese (looks ok) in vb.net as a parameter text field to go straight into the report, bypassing any sql server data - and it still comes out in squares so its definitely nothing to do with collation on SQL.

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Member 12561559 · Answer 1 · 2018-02-06T21:41:00

Solution 1

I got it working. I HAD to go the road of Arial MS Unicode so my reports are going to now have to look different to the font I have used in my application. You would think that Segui UI would be compatible, especially since it does seem to use unicode characters as I have utilised it in the datagridview. Thanks Microsoft, not.

Posted 6-Feb-18 21:41pm

Member 12561559

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Member 343598 9-Mar-23 8:26am

thanks... it saved my time