Mr. .NET

This week’s feature makes it easier to report on data already loaded into your application.

Typically when you create the object hierarchy to represent the data stored in your database you create a series of classes that are interrelated.  A customer object that has orders, each order object has order details, each order detail refers to a product, and so on.  DataSets are usually modeled in similar ways.

Products such as Reporting Services, make it difficult to use this existing data in your report.  They require the object hierarchy to be flattened, that each relationship be traversed and the required data combined with the same row of data.  This isn’t a big problem if the data is being pulled directly from the database, simply change some of the SQL and its flattened.  But if you already have the data in memory then putting it in this format can be difficult.

Data Dynamics Reports on the other hand understands data.  DDR can traverse your object hierarchy or make use of the DataRelations available in your dataset, properties on your business object, or XPath queries in your XML to get to the data needed in your reports.  Now instead of you having to write the code to flatten the data, the data engine inside of Data Dynamics Reports has done it for you.  Now you can get on with creating the report and not have to write code to first fetch the data, yet again.

You can see a sample of how to use this feature with each of the data providers that support it in the NormalizedDataSet sample included with Data Dynamics Reports.

I’m starting a new feature here on my blog; the Feature of the Week.  Here I’ll discuss a cool feature of Data Dynamics Reports and why it makes DDR a compelling reporting solution.

This week’s feature is a new one the Excel Rendering Extension just released in beta in the 1.5 release of Data Dynamics Reports.

This feature is notable for what it allows in Data Dynamics Reports, enough that I’m going to spend a couple posts talking about it!

Foremost is that reports can now be rendered in the Excel format.  This means the business managers can put the data into a tool that they’re intimately familiar with and process it along side the rest of their data.

I’ll get into the really cool part next week in, Excel Transformation Extension.  The magic of the rendering side is that by default it will do its best to create the spreadsheet like you would, without creating an excess number of rows and columns.

You can take it for a test drive yourself, just download Data Dynamics Reports and try it out on some of the samples!  Keep in mind, this is just a beta version of the extension so there are some things not implemented yet, such as support for nested data regions and table/matrix groups don’t honor the current visibility when you export the report.  Jon also created a screencast showing off the stuff you can do with it now, and he teases some of the functionality I’ll talk about in a future post.

In a future Feature of the Week I’ll introduce the Excel Transformation Extension and show off some of the power and utility of it.  Hint: its the same extension!