How to Upgrade an old project to the latest Telerik Reporting version

AUTHOR: Stephania Tapela

DATE POSTED: July 14, 2016

PROBLEM
How to Upgrade an old project to the latest Telerik Reporting version.

SOLUTION 
On upgrading an old project directly to the latest version of Telerik Reporting you may see build errors. The reason is API changes introduced during the years.

To avoid the problem you can rely on the fact that we keep obsolete code for at least an year before changing the API. In the transition period Report Designers are configured to reserialize the obsolete code from the report's definition, and to update it with the new standard.

The recommended approach for upgrading is to download an official release of each year between the project's Telerik Reporting version and the target version. Then you can upgrade the project, and check each report in order to remove warning for obsolete code. A small change in the designer will cause it to reserialize the report definition.
Details how to download MSI files and upgrade project's items can be found in Installing Telerik Reporting and Upgrading Telerik Reporting Projects.


Some important changes during the years:

• Reports should be wrapped in a report source object in order to be passed to a report viewer, SubReport or action - How to migrate your project to utilize the new ReportSource objects.
• As of Q1 2013 there are removed several obsolete properties and namespaces.
• As of Q2 2013 Telerik Reporting is built against .NET4 framework Full Profile, which is supported in Visual Studio 2010+ versions. Also the old Chart item is made obsolete. Its successor is the native reporting Graph item.
• As of Q3 2013 there is a new web viewer - the HTML5 Report Viewer, which is a client-side widget served by a running Reporting REST service, dedicated to work with the viewer.
• As of Q1 2014 the WPF and Silverlight ReportViewer controls use only implicit styles.
• As of Q3 2015 the old ASP.NET WebForms ReportViewer is obsolete.
• As of R3 2016 the ObjectDataSource component requires additional settings (security improvement).
• As of R3 2016 changes on report items definitions in events are not accepted.

More details about major changes can be found in Telerik Reporting Release Notes and the corresponding Upgrade Path help articles.