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We are very happy to announce the Q2 2012 release of Telerik Reporting. The release includes the official version of the standalone Telerik Report Designer. There is no beta tag any more and we have added support for sub-reports, navigation actions (such as drill-down and drill-through), and many UI updates. Some of the UI updates are ribbon tools for borders and format setup, as well as contextual tabs for modifying the TextBox and Table items.

One of the new and more important Q2 features are the Report Sources, because they add a natural abstraction to the different report formats, even when stored in different locations. Prior to Q2 2012 the report viewers, the navigate to report actions, and the subreport item worked natively only with an instantiated report instance or the assembly qualified name of the report type, and only in the Visual Studio Report Designer. This is an obvious limitation, because the new standalone Report Designer, being independent of Visual Studio, cannot work with report instances or assembly qualified names. What is more, Telerik Reporting can also store its reports as XML report definitions (.trdx files) - a case which also needed to cover.

In order to overcome this limitation and to provide an uniform way to access reports stored in different locations and in different formats we are introducing the Report Sources, which can operate not only in the Visual Studio Report Designer, but also in the standalone Report Designer. The available report sources are:

  • Instance report source, used when you have a reference to an already instantiated report and you what to pass it to the reporting engine. Typical scenarios include when you create the reports and assign them programmatically.
  • URI report source which allows you to load a report document either from a file path or from an Url.
  • Type report source - the reports created with Visual Studio are usually stored as .NET classes. To access a .net class declaratively you can use the assembly qualified name of the type.
  • Xml report source is to be used with database fields where the report is stored as pure XML.

By using the new report sources the new standalone Telerik Report Designer has no limitations in loading and accessing reports from any source, which is huge by itself. We nevertheless went further, and made the report sources available in the Web, WinForms, and WPF report viewers (support for the Silverlight viewer will be added for the next release), in the Navigate to Report actions, such as drill-down and drill-through, in the SubReport item, and in the RenderReport and PrintReport report processes. This way we cover almost all possible combinations of report formats, storage locations, and report actions to access a report.

Go ahead, give Telerik Reporting Q2 a try and let us know what you think!
 

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About the Author

Vassil Petev

is a Product Manager at Telerik. Loves gadgets, sailing, skiing and DJing.

@VassilPetev

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