How to Blend Reporting and Angular Applications Seamlessly

The Telerik Reporting Native Angular ReportViewer is built using Kendo UI for Angular components, which allows for major gains in productivity.

What do you do when you have a native Angular web application and need to add reporting services? Leveraging Progress Telerik’s embedded reporting library and fully native Angular ReportViewer, you can keep your front end clean while still leveraging a best-in-class reporting engine.

A Few Words on Telerik Reporting

Let’s talk about Progress Telerik Reporting a bit and how it gives you ultimate flexibility. Telerik Embedded Reporting is a framework for adding reporting features to new and existing applications. The library is based on what I call the three pillars of reporting. Each pillar is decoupled, but they combine to build something truly monumental. The three pillars of Telerik Reporting are Design, Render and View.

Design

The very first step in reporting is to design a report. Telerik Reporting makes this easy by providing three report designers.

• Visual Studio Report Designer:
  The VSRD is an extension for Visual Studio that works with .NET Framework projects only. Reports are created as class library objects (.cs/.vb) and must be compiled before they can be used in a reporting application.
• Standalone Report Designer:
  The SRD is a pre-built windows application dedicated exclusively for report design and testing. It was the first of a new generation of report designers that create reports as serialized XML files (.trdx/.trdp) that are compiled on-demand and easily stored in a DBMS.
• Web Report Designer:
  The WRD is the latest innovation from Progress Telerik in the field of report design. A visual WYSIWYG report designer that lives completely in the web, with nothing to download or install, and all the power and ease of the SRD.

Render

The powerhouse of Telerik Reporting is the embeddable Telerik Reporting rendering engine. This universal .NET package/assembly can be embedded in anything from WinForms to Blazor. Simply provide it a report definition and some basic parameters. The rendering engine will generate a fully rendered report document in one of our many supported formats or stream an interactive report to a ReportViewer discussed below.

View

Telerik Reporting provides more than 10 UI ReportViewers for every common type of application architecture. Web, Cloud or Platform—they’re all supported. Our ReportViewers allow both standard mode viewing of rendered reports (print preview) and interactive mode. Interactive viewing allows for advanced operation like drilldown, sorting and filtering.

ReportViewers are completely decoupled from the rendering engine, which allows for a many-to-many relationship. Any ReportViewer can connect to one or more rendering engines, and any rendering engine can service one or more ReportViewers. Introduced in R3 2023, we have a brand new Native Angular ReportViewer.

A Few Words on Angular

As you know, Angular is an application-design framework and development platform for creating efficient and sophisticated apps. Angular is built on TypeScript, which is a type-safe variant of JavaScript.

Angular also has a large collection of libraries and third-party components that make building an Angular single-page application (SPA) much easier. One such component library is Progress Kendo UI for Angular, a dynamic collection of native Angular components to build highly performant and gorgeous applications.

ReportViewer for Angular

The Telerik Reporting Native Angular ReportViewer is a ReportViewer built using the Kendo UI for Angular components. The toolbar, buttons, menus and all other components come directly from the Kendo UI for Angular library.

This setup allows for major gains in productivity. For one, the ReportViewer will automatically utilize existing Telerik themes. Progress also can guarantee that the components work together perfectly. If any issues are discovered, as the single origin of components, we can rapidly iterate and publish immediate solutions.

Important note: You will need a commercial license for the Kendo UI for Angular library to use the Native Angular ReportViewer. Look into our bundles for huge savings on all your libraries and productivity tools.

Backup Option: ReportViewer Angular Wrapper

Can you still use Telerik Reporting if you DO NOT have a license for Kendo UI for Angular? Naturally, we would love for our customers building Angular applications to utilize Kendo UI for Angular, but if you haven’t started using the library (yet), you’re not out of luck.

We offer a non-native Angular wrapper around our HTML5 ReportViewer. The component is still implemented in TypeScript using Angular semantics, but it wraps our jQuery-based HTML5 ReportViewer. While perfectly serviceable, it doesn’t offer the advantages of a truly native component in terms of performance and aesthetics.

How to Use the Native Angular ReportViewer

Simply follow the step-by-step instructions that our engineers have prepared. I followed these instructions as I was preparing this article and was up and running in under five minutes:

Integrating the Native Angular Report Viewer with the Reporting Service

Important note: I am intentionally not embedding the setup instructions in this article. Our documentation is a living document—with updates constantly being made to reflect the current best-practice and state of affairs in web development.

Conclusion

You don’t need to spend a lot of time adding reporting to your Angular applications. By leveraging Telerik Reporting with our decoupled engine, embeddable web report designer and NEW Native Angular Report Viewer, you can be up and running in no time! Go try it and report back.

Try It Now

Both Telerik Reporting and Kendo UI for Angular are available as part of our Telerik DevCraft bundle, plus lots more. Telerik Reporting allows you to create, style, view, and export rich, interactive and reusable reports to attractively present analytical and any business data. Add reports to any business application through report viewer controls. Export the ready reports to more than 15 formats. Kendo UI for Angular offers 110+ fully native components so you can build high-quality modern Angular UI in no time flat.

If you still have not tried one or both products, or how to integrate the two, you can start a free DevCraft trial to take a closer look. We also provide a support service we are proud of and resources that will help you along the way.

Try Telerik DevCraft