Frequently Asked
Questions

What is Desktop Report Designer?

The Desktop Report Designer also called Standalone Desktop Report Designer is a fully featured tool for creating and editing declarative report definitions. It is distributed to end-users as a self-contained executable called Telerik.ReportDesigner.exe. Originally, it gets distributed to the developer machine from the Telerik Reporting installation process.

The Desktop Report Designer also gets distributed with the installation of the Telerik Report Server product. The tool offers full integration with the server-specific operations like Lock, Save, Publish that enable the multi-user collaboration without collisions on a single Report Server instance. In that use case, the designer gets accessed from the end-users by downloading the executable from the Report Server web manager application. If the client browser supports the ClickOnce deployment technology, the designer gets installed on the client machine adding better OS integration. The designer also benefits from the white labeling feature of the Report Server allowing greater blending with the buyer’s color scheme.

The designer offers the most complete feature set for editing reports (.trdx and .trdp files) and report books (.trbp files). The workbench offers a ribbon bar with multiple tools for layout, formatting, insertion of various report items, data sources addition, and viewing options. It also offers dedicated contextual tools based on the currently selected report item like the Graph item.

The other areas of the designer are the Report Explorer providing a visual representation of the parent-child relation for all items, having the report item itself as a root item. The Data Explorer lists the available fields, including the calculated fields, and allows easy drag-drop behavior to insert new data-bound text labels in the report. The designer also includes classical Visual Studio style Properties Grid area allowing granular setup of extensive report creation APIs.

Finally, the designer offers the Report Design Surface, the heart of the designer bringing the visual representation of the report, and all of its child items, enabling pixel-perfect items movement and resizing. It displays visual cues like snap lines, item offsets from the parent bounds, overlapping warnings, etc.

The designer also has extensibility options from its configuration file, so that custom user functions and business objects can be accessed while working with the report.

The Standalone Desktop Report Designer is integrated in Telerik Reporting alongside with Web Report Designer and Visual Studio Report Designer.

You can evaluate and see all the benefits of Telerik Reporting by downloading a 30-day free trial. Doing so will get you access to our support with response time of less than 24 hours. The trial will also provide you with detailed resources to make the Getting started experience as smooth as possible.

For more information about report designers, visit our report designers page.