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James
105
Code behind reports + report events
posted

I just have a quick question about the Reporting components. 

In the future will it be possible to put code behind the reports? So we can create reports with customised formatting and fairly complex formulas.

In connection with the previous question will the reports have events and allow you to dynamically connect to a database before the report loads? 

One of the things we'd like to do is to have interactive reports where the user can click on a particular data field within the report and it loads the corresponding record within our program. Some reporting components I've looked at before do this within a report viewer event whereas others do it within events of the actual reports.

I'd appreciate any advice you can give.

Many thanks for your time.

James

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  • 2848
    posted

    Hi James,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    Our current thinking is to try to avoid the code-behind approach. It makes some interesting scenarios really cumbersome, like when you want to have the report definition stored in a database, load it from there, and render it. If the only way to do some tasks was code-behind, then those tasks won't be able to be accomplished in those scenarios.

    Our goal is to let you perform those tasks without code-behind. For changing the data source dynamically at runtime, you can use a ReportDataSourceProvider. You can read about it in the docs or see it in the examples (the OrdersReportEntityFrameworkDataSourceProvider.cs class).

    For complex calculations and formatting, our goal is to let you bind any property to any expression (which is not possible in the CTP). You can create fairly complex expressions with the expression language, or you could add properties to the classes you are binding to and perform those calculations in the property getters. We think this is a much cleaner/modern approach than code-behind, but we'd love to hear your thoughts about it.

    Regards,

    Andres

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