How to fix SSRS does NOT count NULL as value? - sql-server

Question

I'm creating a report using SSRS, and I have a bunch of departments and I need to count the total of their running statuses. This is the result from my table
Please note, the UNKNOWN department shows NULL inside the table. i hard coded to 'UNKNOWN' --ISNULL(department,'UNKNOWN')
And i have tested the table has NULL record and I can count those NULL record COUNT(*)
However, it seems like SSRS does not count NULL values.
the SSRS expression i had its =COUNT(Fields!ID.Value)
I need UNKNOWN rows count just as other department
How do I fix this?

Answer 1

I think your problem comes from how the query was written. This is a guess (you didn't provide the query) but I expect you did something like this:
/* Start Demo Data */
DECLARE #Departments TABLE (DepartmentID INT IDENTITY, Name NVARCHAR(50));
INSERT INTO #Departments (Name) VALUES
('Architect'),('Business Intelligence Analyst'),('Data Analyst'),
('Database'),('Information Technology'),('Technical Analyst');
DECLARE #Tickets TABLE (TicketID INT IDENTITY, CreateDateUTC DATETIME DEFAULT GETUTCDATE(), DepartmentID INT, Status NVARCHAR(50));
INSERT INTO #Tickets (DepartmentID, Status) VALUES
(1, 'Completed'),
(2, 'Completed'),(2, 'Completed'),
(3, 'Completed'),(3, 'Completed'),(3, 'Completed'),(3, 'Completed'),(3, 'Completed'),
(3, 'Failure'),(3, 'Failure'),(3, 'Running'),(3, 'Running'),(3, 'Failure'),
(4, 'Completed'),
(5, 'Completed'),(5, 'Completed'),(5, 'Failure'),(5, 'Running'),(5, 'Completed'),
(6, 'Completed'),
(7, 'Failure'),(7, 'Completed');
/* End Demo Data */
SELECT COALESCE(d.Name,'Unknown') AS Department,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Completed' THEN 1 END) AS Completed,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Failure' THEN 1 END ) AS Failure,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Running' THEN 1 END ) AS Running,
COUNT(t.Status) AS Total
FROM #Departments d
INNER JOIN #Tickets t
ON t.DepartmentID = d.DepartmentID
GROUP BY d.Name
ORDER BY Department
Department Completed Failure Running Total
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Architect 1 0 0 1
Business Intelligence Analyst 2 0 0 2
Data Analyst 5 3 2 10
Database 1 0 0 1
Information Technology 3 1 1 5
Technical Analyst 1 0 0 1
This will find all the tickets with a matching department ID in the tickets table, but it will not return any tickets which have a non-matching value in the departmentID column, a NULL for example.
If you change your approach to something like:
SELECT COALESCE(d.Name,'Unknown') AS Department,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Completed' THEN 1 END) AS Completed,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Failure' THEN 1 END ) AS Failure,
COUNT(CASE WHEN t.Status = 'Running' THEN 1 END ) AS Running,
COUNT(t.Status) AS Total
FROM #Tickets t
LEFT OUTER JOIN #Departments d
ON t.DepartmentID = d.DepartmentID
GROUP BY d.Name
ORDER BY Department
You're now asking for all the tickets, and joining that to the departments with a LEFT OUTER JOIN which allows non-matching rows from Tickets to be returned as well. When there is a non-matching (including NULL) value in the departmentID column, it's still part of the result set.
Department Completed Failure Running Total
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Architect 1 0 0 1
Business Intelligence Analyst 2 0 0 2
Data Analyst 5 3 2 10
Database 1 0 0 1
Information Technology 3 1 1 5
Technical Analyst 1 0 0 1
Unknown 1 1 0 2