Devexpress Web Report Designer

[Adimar Poynter]

DevExpressReports is our feature-complete reporting platform and component library for the .NET ecosystem. DevExpress Reports ship with an intuitive Visual Studio Report Designer, runtime Report Designers/Report Viewers for ASP.NET/Blazor/WPF/WinForms/Mobile, and a rich set of report controls, including cross tabs/charts so you and your users can create reports of unmatched elegance and informational clarity.

The success of the modern business enterprise depends upon the accurate exchange of mission-critical information throughout the organization. Demonstrating the impact of individual decisions for managers and employees alike demands an intuitive/cross-platform reporting platform, one that delivers exceptional performance and a variety of customization options.

DevExpress Reports ship with a fully integrated Visual Studio Report Designer, report wizards, pre-built report templates, and end-user report designers so you can build your best inside your favorite IDE.

Our Skia-based cross-platform drawing engine ensures consistent document rendering and Excel/Word/PDF output regardless of the target deployment platform (be it the latest version of .NET or legacy .NET Frameworks). The bottom-line is simple: DevExpress Reports will help your organization address requirements across multiple operating systems and hosting environments (Windows, Linux or macOS, Azure or AWS).

Integrate DevExpress Reports into your next Web/mobile application with absolute ease (for ASP.NET Core, Web Forms, MVC, Blazor Server and WebAssembly, .NET MAUI (Android, iOS), or JavaScript-based Angular, React, Vue, and other frameworks).

Easily embed DevExpress Reports into your desktop application (Windows Forms and/or WPF). Our Document Viewer UI component allows end-users to preview and export reports to PDF, DOCX, RTF, XLS, XLSX, TXT, MHT, CSV, HTML, and multiple image formats including SVG.

To empower end-users with self-service reporting tools and reduce the number of reports you need to create within the Visual Studio IDE, DevExpress Reports for the Desktop ships with an integrated End-User Report Designer.

When used alongside the DevExpress Office File API (available as a separate subscription and included in our Universal product suite), you can efficiently post-process DevExpress Reports generated documents. The DevExpress Office File API allows you to merge multiple documents, extract vital data, and leverage Microsoft Word/Excel file security to help prevent unauthorized editing.

And yes, the DevExpress Office File API represents a gateway to electronic document management. Our Office File API gives you the ability to digitally sign Word, Excel, and PDF files, improving both the integrity and authenticity of document content.

Whether targeting desktops, the web, or your mobile world, DevExpress offers a subscription license option tailored to your specific platform/framework/UI development needs. DevExpress Reports can be purchased on a standalone basis or as part of the following award-winning UI/software development suites:

Simplified Migration Convert Microsoft Access reports, Crystal Reports, RDLC (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports, and Active Reports to DevExpress Reports within the Visual Sudio Report Designer or use our command-line utility.

Data Federation Combine multiple data sources and define joins or master-detail relationships between data source queries. Our Data Federation implementation supports SQL, EF, Object, Excel, JSON, and XPO data sources.

Our Reporting Suite ships with a fully integrated Localization Editor to help you expedite the report translation process. You and your users can easily translate report elements and text strings within Visual Studio.

Ships with a comprehensive suite of WinForms Skins (including vector based), WPF Themes and color schemes for our web reporting components. Create your own skin/theme/color schemes as necessary to deliver the best possible user experience.

Review the list of development tools and frameworks supported by our products. We strongly recommend that you always download and use the most recent versions. If the latest version does not support the IDE or framework you're using, please submit a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center and request an evaluation version that suits your requirements.

Experience the DevExpress difference and see why your peers consistently vote our products #1. With our Universal Subscription, you will build your best, see complex software with greater clarity, increase your productivity and create stunning applications for Windows, Web and your Mobile world.

DevExpress engineers feature-complete Presentation Controls, IDE Productivity Tools, Business Application Frameworks, and Reporting Systems for Visual Studio, Delphi, HTML5 or iOS & Android development. Whether using WPF, ASP.NET, WinForms, HTML5 or Windows 10, DevExpress tools help you build and deliver your best in the shortest time possible.

For the past three years, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has consistently held the top spot as the preferred IDE among members of the global developer community (this conclusion is based on Stack Overflow developer surveys). Wide adoption was one reason we chose to target VS Code. Another was Microsoft's recent announcement regarding Visual Studio for Mac.

As its name implies, our VS Code Report Designer extension allows you to create and edit DevExpress Report documents within the Visual Studio Code IDE. In this blog post, I'll guide you through the setup process on macOS and illustrate how you can leverage the extension's capabilities to develop and modify existing reports.

Note: The current DevExpress VS Code Extension is available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). The primary goal for this release cycle is to gather feedback and refine our long-term development strategies. We've included a short survey at the end of this blog post. If cross-platform development is of importance to you, please take a moment to complete the survey and help us shape the future of our VS Code Extension.

Our Web Report Designer is implemented using JavaScript, with server-side logic executed in .NET. We integrated this designer into Visual Studio Code, allowing the backend to quietly run when you open a workspace with the backend config file. When you double-click a *.REPX (Report Template File), a new IDE dock panel renders the web page with the Report Designer. This implementation is based on .NET 7 and leverages our Skia-based cross-platform drawing engine (allowing you to preview report documents within the IDE itself).

In the following sections of this article, I will use Docker to showcase runtime results. We offer various pre-configured Dockerfiles in the form of a sample project: How to Use the SkiaSharp-Based DevExpress Drawing Engine. We created these Dockerfiles to address potential challenges in both development and deployment processes. The Docker container created from these files installs all necessary native libraries during initialization.

To display document print preview in VS Code, or if developing/executing reports on macOS/Linux locally, make certain to install all native dependencies on your development machine (on macOS, you must use homebrew for this purpose):

I will utilize the following GitHub repository for demonstration purposes: How to Use the SkiaSharp-Based DevExpress Drawing Engine. To follow the steps in this article, hit F1, enter git clone, and provide VS Code with the repository URL to clone it to your machine. Once the directory (with the sample project) opens up in Visual Studio Code, add the new reporting.config.json file to it or generate this file using the DX Reporting: Start Designer VS Code command.

Once you add the file to the opened directory, re-open VS Code to initialize the Report Designer extension OR manually call the DX Reporting: Start Designer command. The IDE will notify you about Report Designer initialization:

At this point, we are ready to add a new report to the sample project. The extension adds a new DX Reporting: New Report command to Visual Studio Code. Simply press F1 once again to use this command and specify a new report name.

At this stage, we can add a data source to this report and design it using our built-in Report Wizard. We will select the data source tab on the right, and then click the "Add Data Source" button to invoke the Data Source Wizard:

For purposes of this example, we'll use a sample "Dummy 100 Users" JSON data source I set up earlier in the reporting.config.file. We'll select the available data source and click "Finish" to complete this operation:

We'll follow wizard prompts to finish the report generation process. If you are following this post, please make certain to save the report template file using the "Save" shortcut (Command+ S in macOS). When you do, you should see the following on-screen:

At this stage, we must modify a few project code files to load this report layout to the XtraReport class at runtime. First, we must move the "newReport.repx" file to the PredefinedReports directory. Once complete, we'll need to make the following changes:

Finally, we'll need to make certain that the report template file is copied to the application output directory each time we build the application. To accomplish this, we'll need to add the following to the "*.csproj" file:

Is there a front end report designer, like devexpress, that can generate itextsharp source code? I'm looking to replace devexpress reports we currently have and use something else. But I really don't want to write code for the look and feel of the report.

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