title: How to configure an Export Option in Reporting Services for Text export with no separators?
body: <p>There's the need to send data to an external interface - a financial statutory report to be sent periodically for some country's government which expects data as text files with no separator between fields: fixed width, left-padded with zeros or blank spaces (depending on data type) to fill the space.</p>
  
  <p>So we created an RDL with the required fields and were looking at adding an export option in for this.</p>
  
  <p>Can an export option be created to export in this format?</p>
  
  <p>We'd like to avoid having to CAST all appropriate fields to NVARCHAR in the stored procedure that feeds the report, left-pad them there and finally concatenate everything - unless that's the only option to accomplish it.</p>
  
  <p>Also, we definitely don't want to code an ad-hoc export method in .NET, there won't be much reports with this exporting option so it's not worth it. Besides it's not so easy to convince the server team to deploy DLLs to servers - if there's something already coded, open source or shareware, we could have a look onto it though wouldn't be the preferred solution.</p>
  
  <p>Previously we had been able to configure the XML configuration file for Reporting Services 2008 to add a new export option for export to Text with fields separated by pipes, so were thinking to try this first. Unfortunately discovered if you use the Text or CSV export motors but specify no separator, comma is used by default.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>