Report Manager for Dot Net

Basics

The dot net version of Report Manager is a translation from Delphi to C# of the reporting engine. The port to dot net is near completion but requires still some work. Libraries are provided so you can link easily your reports with your application.

How it works

You use the designer, and select a dot net provider on database connection configuration dialog. After you do this, the designer will use the dot net version of the engine (Framework 1.1 or 2.0 depending on the selected provider). That is effectively executing the command printreport.exe inside the net or net2 folder inside designer folder.

In Linux, Mono 1.1.13 or newer must be installed (preview and print only word latests versions), in Microsoft Windows, Dot Net runtime Framework 1.1 or 2.0 must be installed depending on the selected provider.

Internals

The internal procedure is save the report in a temp file, as XML (see page setup, prefered save format), then call printreport.exe with command line options (-preview for example). That is when you preview or print, the printreport.exe is used instead of the designer itself. You can also test printreport.exe independently, the only requirement is you save the report as xml (select prefered save format in page setup).

For example, this instruction will generate a pdf file from a report:

printreport.exe -pdf pdfoutputfilename.pdf mysavedreportasxml.rep

Parts already working

• Print preview and printout, including report parameters and page setup.
• PDF output (not truetype embedding support)
• Label, expression, image, drawing, barcode (partial)
• Data providers 1.1: Odbc, OleDB, SQLServer, Firebird, SQLite,Sybase,PostgreSQL,IBM DB2 (Linux),MySQL(Windows)
• Data providers 2.0: Any registered provider, the library does not have any dependence on any data provider. See Framework documentation to know how to register database providers.

Missing parts

• Output as excel, text, csv.
• Linux port: The preview uses the dot net 1.0 preview window becuase 2.0 toolstrips are still not working well in Mono. Print out have been implemented recently in Mono, but it seems to work well, if you experiment problems you can use pdf output and send the pdf file to printer using system commands..
• Some barcodes still missing, charting not implemented
• Other data providers may be included in the future: IBM DB2 (Windows), MySQL (Linux)

Different behaviour

• You must use dot net syntax for parameters in querys, see documentation in dot net platform sdk, usually use @paramname for parameters instead of :paramname. Also add all parameters to parameter definition including the parameters used to link querys.
• In odbc provider you use ? for placing parameters, the parameters will be assigned by position, not by name, parameters by name are not supported by odbc dot net driver, so make sure to sort the parameters to match query position when you use odbc.
• The display format for expressions follows dot net formatting standard (main differences are for date and time formatting, use M for month, and m for minutes).

Using the library

To use the libraries provided, you should include a reference to them in your project.

Modularized libraries are provided, documentation is available but still incomplete.

This is sample code to execute a report, a portion of the sample provided testinglib.exe.

using Reportman.Drawing;

using Reportman.Drawing.Forms;

using Reportman.Reporting;

using Reportman.Reporting.Forms;

Report rp=new Reportman.Report();
rp.LoadFromFile(EFile.Text);
if (pdf)
{
rp.AsyncExecution=false;
PrintOutPDF printpdf = new PrintOutPDF();
printpdf.FileName=pdffilename;
printpdf.Compressed=compressedpdf;
printpdf.Print(rp.MetaFile);
}
else
{
rp.AsyncExecution=asyncexecution;
if (ParamsForm.ShowParams(rp)
{
PrintOutWinForms prw = new PrintOutWinForms();
prw.Preview = preview;
prw.SystemPreview=systempreview;
prw.ShowPrintDialog=showprintdialog;
prw.Print(rp.MetaFile);
}
}