I’ve been designing a new SSRS report this week which has a number of subreports in it. For clarity, what I actually wanted was the title of the subreport to display even if there is no data, however in these instances nothing was displaying. As is often the case with SSRS, getting to the bottom of *why* something is happening can be tricky.
When a subreport has no data, SSRS’s default action is show **nothing**. This is actually the result of the subreport’s dataset returning nothing which then hides the subreport container in the main report. In order to show non-data related items in the subreport the solution is actually quite simple: create another dataset in the subreport that returns some data. And nothing is more simple than
`select ‘ ‘
`
