title: ssrs rdl text box expression concatenation string and field
body: <p>I have several ssrs rdl reports where I am trying to concatenate text then a data set field then text again and it is displayed as a bar code.</p>
  
  <p>Here is the expression:</p>
  
  <pre><code>="*" &amp; Fields!barcodenum.Value &amp; "*"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Example data for <em>200145</em> would look like:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Re7p.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Re7p.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>The report was built with BI in VS 2015. The data set returns the correct data as verified by the query designer.</p>
  
  <p>When I run the report from the 'preview' in VS it displays the correct information for the bar code field.</p>
  
  <p>When the report is published to the SSRS server, 2008R2, it only displays the two stars and no field data.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5UrP4.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5UrP4.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>The field is formatted as a varchar(8).</p>
  
  <p>Am I concatenating the field correctly? Is there a different way to concatenate this?</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be very greatly excepted.</p>