reporting-servicesrdl

Problem with DATE type category in SSRS Stacked Bar chart

I've defined a simple stacked bar (column) chart in Visual Studio 2017 for SSRS SQLServer 2014 as follows

VS rdl for stacked bar chart

The 'StartDate' values are the dates of the first day of a week. I'm setting the x-axis option to use them as 'category' (as opposed to scalar). All straightforward enough. However, with the following dataset, for example,

Sample dataset

The resultant chart comes out as

Sample chart

It seems to be interpolating the dates back to zero, even though I've configured the axis to treat them as 'category'. If I change my query to return the dates formatted as a string prepended with some character it works fine ...

sample chart with non-date values

But, obviously having that prepended character is messy and shouldn't be necessary. What am I missing? Is there some setting that I should be changing?

Solution

  • This problem was caused because of an early mistake I made. I had set the 'StartDate' field as the 'Category' field in the series properties

    Incorrect configuration

    If anyone would care to comment on the difference between providing a 'Category field' here and having a field defined for the 'Category group' that would be appreciated.