Generic Report, but Customized

[Michael Sumerano]

I have just started working with Telerik Reporting and I was wondering if this will be possible.  We have a need to create a generic report that can be used by several different clients to generate a report for their data, but also showing them their logo and possibly other information specific to them.  Is it possible to make these kinds of modifications dynamically to the report after the generic one has been created?

[Chavdar]

Hi Michael Sumerano,

Fortunatelly this is quite possible. A Telerik Report is a .net object defined by a class. You can design the common layout and functionality in a base report class and then inherit it as many times as you need to include the modifications. Furthermore you can modify the report at runtime as it is a .net object.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Kind regards,
Chavdar
the Telerik team

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[Michael Sumerano]

It'd be great to have some examples of this either in the online demos or possibly somewhere else.  :)

[Rossen Hristov]

Hi Michael Sumerano,

We have prepared a small sample project that demonstrates report inheritance. We have a BaseReport that is the common report that will be inherited. The BaseReport contains a TextBox for a product name and a PictureBox for the product logo. Then we have two reports that inherit it (ProductAReport and ProductBReport) and set the values of the textbox and picturebox accordingly. The textbox and picture box are made protected so that inheriting reports can see them and modify their properties. Please examine the provided sample and if you still have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.

Best wishes,
Ross
the Telerik team

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[Kevin]

I am currently working with the Telerik reporting trial, but my company should buy some licenses soon. I am working on a reporting framework where every report inherits a base report. As indicated in this thread, it does just work at the code level. The problem comes up when you are working with the designer.

Designing the BaseReport in the designer works as expected.  It is when you open an report inheriting BaseReport that problems start occuring. First I left all 3 default sections in BaseReport up, PageHeader, PageFooter and Detail. When opening the InheritingReport in designer you only see what appears to be a single section at top of page. A little playing with it, and you find that all 3 sections are there. Unfortunately those 3 sections are on top of each other. So the problem is that in the InheritingReport all 3 sections ended up at the top obscuring each other.

The interesting part is if you bring the report up in the report viewer it properly lays things out.  It is just in the designer it all looks messed up.  And it is messed up in a way that makes it unusable for laying out component on the InheritingReport designer.

[Steve]

Hi Kevin,

This is a known issue that is logged in our system for investigation. Unfortunately we have not had the time to research on it yet and it would be left out for a subsequent release.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[Jason]

Has there been any progress on the issue of the designer being unusable for derived reports?  For us (2009.1 311 trial), the designer is completely empty on the derived report.  As Kevin stated, the report does actually render properly; it's just the designer that is buggy.

We need report inheritance, and the designer has to work on the derived reports.  Without that, I cannot authorize the purchase of this product.  We're impressed with Telerik Reports otherwise, but this is a must-have.  Any news of a fix or even an estimated time frame for a fix?

[Steve]

Hello Jason,

This issue has not been addressed yet and is in our TODO list. Unfortunately we cannot engage with a timeframe at this point, although we would do our best to have it addressed as soon as possible.

All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team

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[mzn developer]

I notice this behavior has not been patched in the latest version of Telerik Reporting afaik.  Any timeframe on when the designer will be fixed when inheriting from a base report?

I am experiencing an issue with a table on my derived report.  My base class defines my header info, and that is working, however I have a table on the derived report in the details section that comes up blank when I derive from my base report.  Once I remove the base derivation and derive from regular Report, my table starts working again. I am not getting any .NET exceptions, and I have walked the code to verify it is indeed setting the datasource to a non-empty dataset.

Any thoughts on why the table in the derived report is not working?

Thanks!

[Svetoslav]

Hi mzn developer,

As previously explained, we are aware of the issue. Because of the complexity of the problem we need some more time to find and implement the best solution.

Once again please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for the understanding and patience.
 

Best wishes,
Svetoslav
the Telerik team

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[Zbyněk]

Hi,
Can I ask you how this issue seems like now ?

Best regards
Zbyněk ŠULC

[Steve]

Hi Zbyněk,

The design time issue of inherited reports still stands. There is no specified time frame and once we start working on this task, it would be duly noted in our Roadmap.

Greetings,
Steve
the Telerik team

[Simo]

Hi,
I have worked with Telerik Reporting for a couple of weeks now and I have a similar need to be able to derive reports from one base report. I created the report normally. Then I copied it in two new reports, BaseReport and ReportContent. Then I delete everything except PageHeader, ReportHeader and PageFooter from BaseReport and delete everything except GroupHeaders, Details, GroupFooters and ReportFooter from the ReportContent. It must be noticed that not all things can be deleted from the designer, they must be deleted from the designer.cs-file.

Everything works fine. BaseReport preview shows the page headers and footers, and ReportContent preview shows the whole report. If the designer shows something wrong, the cause is probably that there is some duplicate section or other duplicate element in either the base or content reports.

If I want to create a new report, I take a copy of the ReportContent and alter the elements there.

Greetings,
Simo

[Shawn Krivjansky]

Is Simo's workaround the only way to do this?

Any progress from Telerik in the last year??

It would seem pretty basic in the world of reporting to have a "template" to work off of for new reports that have the same basic stuff on every report.

Would it be easier/better to use VS item templates to accomplish this?
Haven't tried it, but does anybody think that would work?  Any known issues?

BTW, I have tried the "base class" stuff (without Simo's workarounds) and it would seem fairly unuseable if you need to actually use the designer to customize the derived reports.  I mean... that is the point of a "template" right?  You want to start with something and then customize.  As most have found, the designer of the "derived" report is completely mangled and unrecognizeable.  Moreover, if you try to change what is there (only a report header in my case), it basically duplicates everything from the base report into the derived report which causes errors galore.

[Hrisi]

Hi Shawn,

I really don't understand why you ask to inherit the reports. They are normal CLR types and you can subclass them as you want and they will work. The problem arises when you try to serialize them in xml in order to edit them in our standalone designer. Because your intention is to separate reports - base report and content report, the only possible way to do that is by representing the content as subreport, similar to Master/Detail reports as in our example Invoice report.

Of course you can use VS ItemTeplates, the only overhead is to prepare them. You can use our template in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Reporting\Telerik_Reporting_Q2_2011.zip as example.
For the upcoming release next month, we would introduce templates for the xml reports created via the standalone designer.

Please, consider using base report as main report and every content part realized as subreport.

Greetings,
Hrisi
the Telerik team

[Shawn Krivjansky]

I did NOT ask to inherit the reports.

The original post asked about the recommended way to template a report, so the basics of it could be used as a starting point for other derivitive reports.  (headers, footers... common things to all reports).

Telerik then responded with creating a base class and inheriting new reports from it as the "way to do it".

A number of people (myself included) responded that the new (inherited from) reports (that use the base class) are unuseable in the designer (main designer... not talking about stand-alone designer).  If we can't "design" an inherited report, this whole process is useless.

That was our point.

Creating a VS item template is certainly the way to go with this.
Unless you are building reports in code-only, the item template approach is by far the cleanest way to do this (in my opinion).

[Vishal]

Hi,

Can you please send me the sample code for it ?

Thanks
Vishal

[sitefinitysteve]

So...I'm guessing this is still not doable since focus seems to be 100% on the standalone designer?

[Andrew]

I'm new to Telerik but I'm thinking the way to do this is to create custom report controls, one for company header and one for company footer.  Inside the custom control code you would programatically add what sub controls you need for things like title, logo, page number etc.

Then there is no problem with the designer, just create a new report and drop the standard header/footer on.

What do others think of this?  
Has anyone done it?  
Are there any examples of custom report controls especially ones that contain other controls and are resizable etc?

[Stef]

Hello Andrew,

Extending the report items is not possible in terms of using them design-time. What we can recommend is to use a master-detail scenario, where you have a master report which can be extended by the reports contained within SubReport items. Note: SubReports can be used only in the report sections, not in the page sections.

For an example of master-detail scenario, please check our Invoice Report online demo and if you have selected to install our demos you can find the sample report under C:\Program Files (x86)\Telerik\Reporting Q1 2013\Examples (the default installation folder).

If you want to programmatically create some parts of the report, you can dynamically add features to a report object at run-time. 

I hope this helps.

Greetings,
Stef
the Telerik team

[Lasse]

Recently I found myself in the same situation of wanting to implement a BaseReport in which to implement general ReportParameters, so other reports could inherit from this report and automatically get those default parameters.

Needless to say, that would make my life a lot easier as I would be able to manage and maintain those default ReportParameters in one place.

However, when opening the derived report in the VS Report Designer, the parameters from the BaseReport would automatically be added to the Designer.cs file of the derived report, generating a bunch of errors in the report designer, since these ReportParameters already exist.

Today I found this way to work around this issue:

First, implement a BaseReport class inheriting from Telerik.Reporting.Report - see implementation below.

The BaseReport implementation shown here contains an initialization method that must be called after InitializeComponent() in the constructor of your derived report.

That way, the BaseReport will be able to remove any existing parameters (added by the Report Designer’s automatic code generation) before adding the default ones. Since this happens before the Report Designer shows the report, there will be no errors in the Report Designer.

The BaseReport also contains a method for easily getting parameter values, and an example of a property that can be used in code behind in the derived report.

Now you can add a new report or modify an existing one, making it inherit from BaseReport in stead of Telerik.Reporting.Report – while being able to customize the inherited report in the Report Designer.

BaseReport Implementation:

01.using System;
02.using System.Collections.Generic;
03.using System.Configuration;
04.using System.Linq;
05.using System.Web;
06.using Telerik.Reporting;
07.
08.namespace MyReporting
09.{
10.  public class BaseReport : Telerik.Reporting.Report
11.  {
12.    /// <summary>
13.    /// Gets the MyStringParameter.
14.    /// </summary>
15.    /// <value>The MyStringParameter.</value>
16.    public string MyStringParameter
17.    {
18.      get
19.      {
20.        return GetParameter<string>("MyStringParameter");
21.      }
22.    }
23.
24.    /// <summary>
25.    /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="BaseReport"/> class.
26.    /// </summary>
27.    public BaseReport()
28.    {
29.    }
30.
31.    /// <summary>
32.    /// Initializes the BaseReport.
33.    /// </summary>
34.    public virtual void InitializeBaseReport()
35.    {
36.      var _parm1 = new ReportParameter();
37.      _parm1.Name = "HiddenStringParam";
38.      _parm1.Type = ReportParameterType.String;
39.      _parm1.Value = "Default value";
40.      AddParameter(_parm1);
41.
42.      var _dateFrom = new ReportParameter();
43.      _dateFrom.Name = "DateFrom";
44.      _dateFrom.Type = ReportParameterType.DateTime;
45.      _dateFrom.Value = DateTime.Now;
46.      _dateFrom.Text = "From";
47.      _dateFrom.AllowNull = true;
48.      _dateFrom.Visible = true;
49.      AddParameter(_parm2);
50.
51.      var _dateTo = new ReportParameter();
52.      _dateTo.Name = "DateTo";
53.      _dateTo.Type = ReportParameterType.DateTime;
54.      _dateTo.Value = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);
55.      _dateTo.Text = "To";
56.      _dateTo.AllowNull = true;
57.      _dateTo.Visible = true;
58.      AddParameter(_dateTo);
59.    }
60.
61.    /// <summary>
62.    /// Adds the parameter, removing any existing matching parameters.
63.    /// </summary>
64.    /// <param name="parm">The parm.</param>
65.    public void AddParameter(ReportParameter parm)
66.    {
67.      var index = ReportParameters.IndexOf(parm.Name);
68.      if(index > -1)
69.      {
70.        ReportParameters.RemoveAt(index);
71.        ReportParameters.Insert(index, parm);
72.        return;
73.      }
74.      ReportParameters.Add(parm);
75.    }
76.
77.    /// <summary>
78.    /// Gets the parameter value.
79.    /// </summary>
80.    /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
81.    /// <param name="parameterName">Name of the parameter.</param>
82.    /// <returns>T.</returns>
83.    public T GetParameter<T>(string parameterName)
84.    {
85.      return ReportParameters.Contains(parameterName) ? ReportParameters[parameterName].Value.TypeCastObject<T>() : default(T);
86.    }
87.  }
88.}

[Lasse]

Example of derived report constructor:

01.using System;
02.using System.Linq;
03.using System.ComponentModel;
04.using System.Drawing;
05.using System.Windows.Forms;
06.using Telerik.Reporting;
07.using Telerik.Reporting.Drawing;
08.
09.namespace MyReporting
10.{
11.  /// <summary>
12.  /// Summary description for DerivedReport.
13.  /// </summary>
14.  public partial class DerivedReport : BaseReport
15.  {
16.    /// <summary>
17.    /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="DerivedReport"/> class.
18.    /// </summary>
19.    public DerivedReport()
20.    {
21.      InitializeComponent();
22.
23.      // Make the BaseReport do its initialization
24.      InitializeBaseReport();
25.    }
26.  }
27.}

[Ronan]

Has the issue with the designer inheriting other reports been resolved?

This is an old post and wanted to double check on if there was an effective patch for inheriting reports. 

Thanks!

[Katia]

Hi Ronan,

If the report inherits from a custom class instead of Telerik.Reporting.Report the design-time support for this report in the Visual Studio report designer will be lost.
We recommend to inherit from the default Telerik.Reporting.Report class.

Other approach is to use a SubReport item to change the content of the report while the master report has a base content.


Regards,
Katia
Progress Telerik

[ids]

Dear Support ,

Could any one help me to make base report and sub report at design time using telerik report designer .

Regards .

[Nidal]

Dear Support ,
Could any one help me to make base report and sub report at design time using telerik report designer .
Regards .

[Todor]

Hi ids and Nidal,

We have answered the same question in the support ticket opened by ids on the topic. For the benefit of our community I will publish the reply also in this thread.

For designing reports you may refer to First Steps articles that demonstrate how to create and set up report. Here are the general steps :
1) Create a report which will be the subreport. 
2) Add the report items in it and save it. Note that the page header and page footer of the subreport are not displayed in the main report.
3) Create the main report.
4) Go to Insert -> Subreport .
6) Right click over it -> ReportSource -> URL or file -> Select a file -> navigate to the destination of the report -> OK.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik