Reporting - Important Change and Tips & Tricks (November 2020)

In this post, I will highlight an important change related to DevExpress Reports and its use within an ASP.NET Core project.

I’ll also share links to a few interesting technical support tickets we’ve received recently. I hope the information herein will be valuable to those of you using DevExpress Reports or considering it for an upcoming project. As always, should you have any questions, feel free to post your comments below.

.VSREPX - New Report File Format

Both our Visual Studio Report Designer and our End-User Report Designer generate .REPX files. While this might create the impression that these files can be used interchangeably, there are important differences between the two:

• .REPX files generated by our Visual Studio Report Designer may include event handlers for components and report controls.
• .REPX files created in our Visual Studio Report Designer do not automatically serialize subreport source types and report data sources.
• .REPX files generated in our Visual Studio Report Designer must include report class definitions in order to correctly restore report layouts from these files.
• Restoring a report from a .REPX file generated in the VS Report Designer may throw an exception at runtime.

Because of these differences, a Visual Studio-generated .REPX file may cause unexpected behavior and/or discrepancies in the generated document if opened in the End-User Report Designer or passed as an argument to the XtraReport.LoadLayout / LoadLayoutFromXml method.

To address this issue, we introduce a new XML-based .VSREPX file format. With our v20.2.4 update, this file is generated when you add a new report to a Visual Studio project instead of the former .REPX file.

To avoid breaking changes to your application, we do not prevent the runtime loading of .REPX files that were generated with older versions of DevExpress Reports. However, if you try to load a report from the new .VSREPX file format, the following InvalidOperationException is thrown:

To eliminate the exception, convert the file to .REPX before you pass it to LoadLayoutFromXml. At design time, open the .VSREPX file in the Visual Studio Report Designer and save the report to .REPX. At runtime, call XtraReport.SaveLayoutToXml to produce a .REPX file.

Interesting Support Tickets

Reporting – Multiple Supported Platforms (WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, .NET Core)

• How to print a vertical label through mutliple bands within a group (T944549)
• How to add a text input field to a report and maintain it in a resulting PDF file (T927978)
• How to format date range parameter values in a label (T932662)
• Reports Localization - How to use resource strings from a shared assembly in different reports (T941453)
• How to collect report bookmarks and create an external table of contents (T925725)

Reports for ASP.NET Core

• Web Report Designer - How to add a dropdown editor to the toolbar (T950688)
• How to access a report in iFrame from an Angular popup (T951162)
• How to change a report language at runtime (T937774)

Reports for ASP.NET MVC

• How to hide the Export Options tab (T953547)
• Drill-Through Report - How to open a nested report in a new tab (T929828)
• How to hide/show a parameter based on another parameter’s value (T936527)

Reports for ASP.NET Web Forms

• Web Report Designer - How to to switch to the preview or design mode programatically (T952114)
• How to maintain the sort order of report records when exporting a report programmatically (T947198)
• How to override the PDF export command and specify a custom file download path (T925175)

Reports for Blazor

• Blazor Report Designer - How to hide all properties within a category (T929980)

• Blazor Report Designer - How to hide main menu entries (T929989)

• Blazor Document Viewer - How to pass arguments to a report (T905748)

Reports for WPF

• WPF .NET Core Reporting - What NuGet package should I use (T951687)

• WPF Report Designer - How to override the Save command (T948352)

• WPF Report Designer - How to override the CloseDocument and Exit commands (T952828)

Your Feedback Matters

As always, we welcome your thoughts. Please comment below and let us know what you think about our new .VSREPX file format. Should you have technical questions, feel free to contact us via the DevExpress Support Center.

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