Import a trdx file from Report Designer into VS2012

[Thomas]

I created a report in the Report Designer and saved it as the .trdx file. I now want to hand off the report to the developer to integrate into our application and finish the last few parts of the report. When the developer opens the file in Visual Studio 2012 he only sees the XML. How do I import the report from the .trdx into Visual Studio 2012 so the report can be modified/updated and integrated with the application? 

So for example, when the developer creates a new report in VS2012 he gets the view similar to what I see in Report Designer. When I give him the .trdx file, he cannot get that same view, just the XML. 

[Ed Lance]

+1 for this feature.  If we give users the ability to do their own ad-hoc reports with the designer, they will want the ones they create integrated.  Need to be able to import .trdx files.

Thanks

[Peter]

Hi Thomas,

The trdx report definitions can only be edited in the standalone Report Designer. However you can still embed and view reports in report viewers because the report viewers can support different report sources. In order to use the trdx report definitions our suggestion is to utilize the UriReportSource.

Regards,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Thomas]

Thank you for the response.

So the answer is, no. You can not create a report in Report Designer and have that migrated directly into Visual Studio. The UriReportSource isn't a solution for this nor even a workaround, it addresses completely different requirements. 

I would consider this a significant lack of functionality in the Report Designer. It limits the usefulness of the tool. For us it means we cannot use the Report Designer tool, or if a user creates a report and we need to add it to the software, we have to rewrite the report from scratch in Visual Studio due to a number of reasons. 

So for future versions, I would request this functionality be added. It would make the tool much more useful. 

[Shahrouz]

Thomas,

I could not agree more. This is a huge lacking feature not in the Report Designer. I will even add to that. We have Telerik Reporting Project in Visual Studio that we store in TFS. We were hoping the stand alone designer would eliminate the need to use Visual Studio (Junior Analysts) however I do not see any TFS integration within the Stand Alone Designer.

Now that I think about it the stand alone designer can not even create report project solutions, but only simple reports. Not sure what the huge benefit of this is without these important features.

[Svetoslav]

Hi guys,

Thank you for your feedback.

Let me address the TFS question first. Although the Report Designer does not integrates with TFS a viable solution could be to use Microsoft's TFS Power tools that "provide integration with Windows Explorer and the common file dialogs. With this integration, you can perform many source control operations without having to run Visual Studio or a Team Foundation command-line tool."

Now, to the initial question: the solution would be your developers to use the standalone Report Designer to finish the reports, and then integrate them into the application (details on that below). We did not provide the option to edit TRDX report definitions in Visual Studio, because we envisioned the process to be opposite: a developer would create the initial report/template in Visual Studio or in the standalone designer, and the end-user would only use the standalone designer to edit and review these reports. We will consider this feature request if we have more requests about it, although it would be hard to implement. Even though the two report designers share significant part of the designer functionality, the Visual Studio reads/generates code only (C#, VB.NET), while the standalone report designer works with TRDX files only.

Having two different media for representing the report definition (code/xml) does not limit the application/usage of any of them. For example, in the latest release of Telerik Reporting - 2012 Q3 - we've added support for importing reports compiled into .NET assemblies (generated from VS) into the standalone report designer.

Using XML reports (i.e. embedding them) in your applications is very straightforward too. We offer the ReportSource objects that allow referencing reports:

• by theirs CLR type names;
• loaded into the memory (objects of type Telerik.Reporting.Report);
• from TRDX files (local files or URL)
  -or-
• from a sting that represents the report definition in XML

In addition we provide an easy way to serialize report objects to XML and vice verse - to load XML into report object in the memory.  

Using both the ReportSources and the ReportXmlSerializer you have unlimited control over your reports; you can have your reports as external TRDX files or you can even embed them as resources (embedded resources) into the application; when needed you can load the reports into the memory and apply your additional logic before displaying into the report viewer controls, render or print.

Anyway your feedback is extremely valuable to us so keep it coming! We will highly appreciate if you share with us your particular use cases and scenarios so we can evaluate them on our end and find the best solution for you and the product.

Greetings,
Svetoslav
the Telerik team

[Ed Lance]

I recommend re-visiting the vision, because there are scenarios where end users create a report, then want the developers to integrate it into an application.  While your examples show that we can use the .trdx in the application, it doesn't become part of the source of our main reports dll and doesn't get edited in VS. 

As far as being hard to do, really? I'll be you guys can do it.  You already have the Report Wizard that knows how to import other formats and write out the vb/cs files.  You would just add another item there for .trdx import.  Then you open the .trdx as XML and go through the nodes, emitting code for each item.  If I had the time, I could even write that part. 

[Vassil Petev]

Hi Ed,

Thank you for the feedback. We will definitely reconsider this feature if we receive more requests about it.


Greetings,
Vassil Petev
the Telerik team

[MikeK]

I have to agree with all of these requests. There is a need to be able to do mockups under the report designer. Going back and forth with our end users is tedious, but very necessary to meet all requirements. I had one of my developers use the report designer for this purpose. We have multiple projects running parallel and this path looked very promising. I could have a developer mockup in a tool that could be used for the finished project. Today, I'm looking at pulling her code into our web app - and followed these threads where I see that I can't use the mockup directly. This means that our team has to build the report in Visual Studio from scratch. Yeah, we can use the mockup as a guide - but that wastes a lot of time.

The last post in this thread had stated that there should be an import just like Crystal Reports or similar to be able to pull the trdx layout into the project. That makes total sense. That can't be all that difficult. I don't even care if the data bindings don't work - I need the labels, text boxes, fonts, etc. that makeup the form. I'll plumb the rest.

We're bringing up a data warehouse in Q1 2013. Being able to allow our financial users to build their own reports, then turn these over to development would be a real time saver. I don't want to use the other data source suggested, I want to plumb the code through our standards. Otherwise, we have two different paths to support.

Please work on a method to import the trdx files from Visual Studio. Thank you.

[Darryl]

I haven't used the stand alone report designer much at all.

I did assume, however, that it was designed to allow end users and developers to easily create reports (requiring no event handling) and then import them into Visual Studio for integration into an application.

I was very surprised to discover this is not the case and, as a developer, can't see any reason to use it.

[Shawn Krivjansky]

would be a nice feature.

[Joe]

Consider this one more request for the functionality!

[Suba]

hi can we able to create a report in telrik report designer instead of using .net , if so pl provide me screenshots
thanks

[Peter]

Hello,

Check out the standalone Telerik Report Designer.

All the best,
Peter
the Telerik team

[Kevin F]

This is an absolute must-have!  I have at least 40 reports created by a non-Visual Studio user (in the standalone) that I have to import into my web application.  I also assumed the two (standalone and visual studio) would be compatible.

Please add this feature!!!!

[Squall]

Have you tried the UriReportSource? With this reportsource you can utilize the trdx reports in the web report viewer and reportprocessor.

[Iana Tsolova]

Hello,

As of Q2 2014 importing .trdx files in Visual Studio is a out-of-the-box supported scenario. To find out how, check the following help article:
http://www.telerik.com/help/reporting/import-report-wizard.html

It's important to mention that you don't need to convert the .trdx file to a report class in order to render the report. You only need to use the UriReportSource to feed any report viewer with .trdx report definition. The conversion is necessary only if you want to use the API to programmatically design the reports.

Regards,
Iana Tsolova
Telerik