Create Dynamic rdlc file for Reportviewer control C# - dynamic

I want to be able to create dynamic, the xml file with report definition files rdlc for reportviewer control in
System.Windows.Form.
To do this I need the complete documentation of xml structure of the rdlc file.
It's somebody can help me?
I found already the fallowing links:
The best link is :http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms170667(v=sql.105).aspx
but, is for an particular report. I need something more general, but no complicate like :http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd297486%28SQL.100%29.aspx

I found an article which look good enough for what I need.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee240083(v=sql.105).aspx

Related

how to visually design reports generated by dossier?

I have used dossier to generate reports in my application. Now I want to visually design my reports generated by dossier like charts. Is there any gem available to do that? Can you please any one help me (or) tell me to how to use iReport in rails application.
Dossier currently does not provide any visualizations (though that would be a nice enhancement). I have been using to to power various JS charting libraries using JSON. Any report can be converted to JSON format by adding a ".json" extension to the report url. Generally I have found that I will have to alter the way I write the sequel selects slightly to get the right JSON output, but overall have had good success with this strategy.
Let me know if I can answer any other questions on this.
Thanks!

Creating RDLC reports dynamically w/o XML editing

Most would suggest using one of the many XML editors to create a customized RDLC XML, according to user selections, and passing that report to Microsoft's Report Viewer object. I currently implement this method in previous version of my code. However, it is messy, long and lacks eloquence to say the least.
Previous research, I can't remember exactly where I saw it, has led me to believe there is a method to create a data-set, dynamically through code, create an adapter to fill the data-set, and then have that dataset.writeXML() to produce a fully functional copy of XML that can be passed to the Microsoft Report Viewer object.
Again to clarify, I do not want to use XML classes to write my report up. I want to build my dataset through code depending on user selection, have the dataset write out the XML and then pass that to the Reporting object.
A lot of the stuff I've found favors ASP.NET for some reason and I have yet to fully verse myself in its workings.
It seems that what I'm trying to do is write out the RDL (Report Definition Language). This RDL is a set of tags that the Microsoft Report Viewer interprets in order to produce a viewable object to the end user. A data-set is an element of that RDL definition so it really can't produce the RDL itself. Kind of like a baby giving birth to a mama. Here are some excellent resources I found that shed insight into the elements of an RDL file.
Here

how to use .rdlc parameter in report's query?

I'm passing a parameter to my .rdlc file, which is working properly. What I can't figure out is how to then use that parameter in the query the reports dataset uses. How can I use this parameter in the query?
I'm designing it in Visual Studio 2008. If there is some other method I'm not aware of, please suggest that also. I want to keep the report as un-coupled with the program as possible so I can reuse it.
The only answer I can find is that this is not how reporting services works. You must give it a dataset at runtime which has the same schema as the dataset used at design time.
I was expecting (and hoping for) a similar behavior to Crystal Reports, where you can open a stand-alone report file and be prompted for parameters, and then embed that same report into an application and pass it parameters programatically. Reports are more portable that way, but if its not possible...

Is there a utility to create VB.NET classes from an XSD file?

Is there a utility out there that will create VB.NET classes from a Dataset.xsd file? And I don't mean like the XSD.exe utility does - all that does is convert the XML of an XSD file into classes in a .vb - it doesn't append any "extended" functionality.
I'm basically looking for something that will generate the beginnings of a business layer from the XSD file. Like creating a partial class for each datatable, then create a property for each of the datatable's columns as the right datatype and finally the basically CRUD methods as well.
This is something I have to do manually over and over again for each project. (I do lots of little projects and use VistaDB so I can't use Linq-To-SQL - wish I could)
I think that xsd.exe will do what you need it to. Here's and example to convert purchaseorder.xsd to a vb class in the Purchasing namespace:
xsd.exe -c -l:vb -n:Purchasing purchaseorder.xsd
Type xsd.exe /? from a visual studio command prompt to get all of the options.
You can find more info here.
Try taking a look at T4 and Code Generation tools in Visual Studio. It's like "writing code that writes code", and it's incredibly powerful.
A great video, really an "aha experience" for me
http://www.pnpguidance.net/Screencast/T4TemplatesVisualStudioCodeGenerationScreencast.aspx
MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx
Rob Conery has written an intro:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/make-visual-studio-generate-your-repository/
... and so did Scott Hanselman:
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/T4TextTemplateTransformationToolkitCodeGenerationBestKeptVisualStudioSecret.aspx
I understand it's probably not exactly what you're hoping for, but when you want more flexibility and NOT having to write the same code over and over again, it really sounds like T4 could be a solution.
You'll write a template, that analyses your XSD file and generates the vb files directly in your project.
I know this doesn't strictly answer the question, but it looks like VistaDB either does, or will soon, have a provider that can be used with Linq to Entities - see here
Liquid studio XML Data Binder looks like it does what you want and has a 30 day trial you can download.

Generate PDF from structured data

I want to be able to generate a highly graphical (with lots of text content as well) PDF file from data that I might have in a database or xml or any other structured form.
Currently our graphic designer creates these PDF files in Photoshop manually after getting the content as a MS Word Document. But usually, there are more than 20 revisions of the content; small changes here and there, spelling corrections, etc.
The 2 disadvantages are:
1) The graphic designer's time is unnecessarily occupied. The first version is the only one he/she should have to work on.
2) The PDF file becomes the document which now has the final revised content, and the initial content is out of sync with it. So if the initial content needs to be somewhere else (like on a website), we need to recreate it from the PDF file.
Generating the PDF file will help me solve both these problems. Perhaps some way in which the graphic designer creates a "Template" and then puts in tags/holders and maps these tags/holders to the relevant data.
Thanks :-)
There are some tools out there for doing this. XSL-FO is useful. Here is a tutorial for creating a pdf from xml (or xhtml) with cocoon. Also see Apache FOP.
You could format your SQL data as XML and still use the same templates this way.
I use the ReportLab python library for this. It could perhaps solve your problem, but you will need to do some work...
In the past I have written scripts that spit out LaTeX then used texi2pdf to solve this kind of problem.
Take a look at iReport and JasperReports at http://jasperforge.org.
iReport lets you design reports, and then you can either programatically fill it with the JasperReports library (Java), or just use iReport to manually create the report.
I have only used it for tabular data, but I don't think there would be any problem for other types of documents.
You could create a form and populate the entries programmatically using a pdf library like iText (Java).
You could look at doing the workflow in PostScript which is plain text that you can easily compose from fragments. Then you can use any free tool to convert to PDF.
Take a look at Prince XML. This tool allows to generate PDF based on XML or HTML and CSS.
A possible way is to use a template engine, like FreeMarker or StringTemplate: these are often used to generate HTML, but they are flexible enough to output any format, actually.
The problem is to make a PDF template, I suppose. Perhaps you can take a sample output and edit it to replace data with placeholders to be filled by the template engine. Might not be trivial!
Sounds like a job that SQL Server Reporting Services can handle quite easily.
Reporting Services allows you to query the data, define the layout, and export to PDF without any intervention. The PDF output can be distributed via email, stored on a file share, and accessed via a page on the report server.
It can handle XML data sources too.
Another approach to generating a PDF file from data is to use prawn, which is based on ruby. I was very pleasantly surprised by how much functionality is included in prawn. It may take some investment up front but this approach will give you a lot of flexibility.
You can combine CSStoXSLFO with XEP from RenderX for high quality output. With this solution you can merge XML data into an XHTML template, which is decorated with CSS. It can also generate charts with the fantastic JFreeChart library. CSS3 page media features are supported.