I need to create reports with 2 levels of details. For example:
(top level): Name, SSN, Address
(1st level down): Account type, Account number
(2nd level down): Deposit/Withdrawl amount, date, payee
Can the infragistics report tool perform this?
Can there be multiple parent/child/grandchild hierarchies in the same report?
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Also, can the data-source for this report be a hierarchical (in this case, 1 parent level + child levels + grandchild levels) xml file? How is the reported to the structure of the xml file?
Thanks!
Hi,
Question 1: Yes, in order to do that you will have to define a data source with all the required data and define two groups. The outer most group will group by SSN (assuming that is the key) and the other by “Account type, Account number”. You can define those groups at the report level or at the table level or a combination of the two. If it’s a SQL DataSource you will need to join all the required tables in a single SQL statement. If it’s an ObjectDataSource you will need to define the data source over the third level of hierarchy and have a way to navigate to the parent (e.g. if you have Contact/Account/Transactions you need to bind to a list of Transactions and then group by transaction.Account and account.Contact).
Question 2: Currently the only way to display hierarchies inside the report is using the group by approach previously described. You can include several tables inside the report each one displaying a hierarchy using groups. At the report level you can only associate one data source which is used by the groups defined outside tables.
But we currently don’t support hierarchical data sources. Add support for them is our lists.
Question 3: We will support them when we add support for hierarchical data sources.
Thanks,
Leo
Hi Leo,
Thanks for the reply. Much of our data for reports is three layers deep (parent, child, grand-child), so it's a key feature for us. Because of this, the XML is a better data source than a traditional table/dataset structure.
We currently use another reporting tool, but it also doesn't really deal well with hierarchical xml datasources: We play games to get it to work, and it does, but it always takes a ton of developer time to get it to work. Hopefully you can add hierarchical xml data sources sometime soon, and we'll then look at possibly using Infragistics for reporting.