What’s new in Q3 2012 release of the Telerik Report Designer

In Q3 2012 release of Telerik Reporting we are once again introducing multiple improvements and new features in the stand alone Report Designer, which will allow users to be totally independent of Visual Studio when creating and editing reports.

Importing existing reports to the standalone Report Designer

One of the most important additions in Telerik Reporting Q3 2012 for our longtime customers is the possibility to import reports created in Visual Studio into the Report Designer, which can then be passed to the end-user for self-editing. A new wizard will import your Telerik reports (and all its existing functionality) from assemblies with the Telerik report types into the Report Designer's XML report definition format (*.trdx).

Connecting to Object/OpenAccess/Entity data sources in the Report Designer

All of the Telerik Reporting data source components (plus a new related wizard) will allow you to connect a report in the standalone Report Designer to custom CLR objects, data models (such as an OpenAccess ORM model), external assemblies with custom data source objects, data feeds (including OData), and web services. This was a popular request, because many of you already have an existing data model which you would like to consume by the Report Designer and pass onto your users.

Embed your custom CLR object functions in the standalone Report Designer

In Q3 you can reference your assemblies that contain user functions and reuse those static methods in the standalone Report Designer. The valuable user functions allow developers to extend the default behavior of the Telerik Reporting engine, and were available in the Visual Studio report designer. Now, you can reuse your existing user functions with the standalone Report Designer by adding the references in the Telerik Report Designer config file:

Report templates in the standalone Report Designer

Report templates are the specimens for future reports, which will allow your users to create reports based on a pre-canned template. The template can contain connection(s) to the data source, report sections, report items, formatting & styling and parameters. The main advantage of having report templates is saving time - you can create the templates once, and provide them to your user to create the reports they need. Report templates can also be created from existing reports, and can be saved in predefined locations, which are monitored by the Report Designer.

Want to see the new features in action? Hurry up and reserve your seat for Webinar Week (October 22- 26). Seats are limited at 1,000 per webinar. Book your seat for Webinar Week now!