Could you add a feature which would allow us to edit the raw XML of a report.

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Declined

Last Updated: 19 Oct 2023 13:41 by ADMIN

Pascal

Created on: 15 Sep 2023 02:10

Type: Feature Request

Could you add a feature which would allow us to edit the raw XML of a report.

To help troubleshoot and solve many of my positioning issues I've viewed and edited a report's XML file.

The process requires us to download the report, change the report file to [*.zip], extract [definition.xml], open and edit the file, replace the XML file in the ZIP file, rename the file, upload the new file into Telerik reporting to see one edit.

Being able to view and edit the [.xml] directly in our Telerik Web Designer would be greatly appreciated.

5 comments

ADMIN

Dimitar

Posted on: 19 Oct 2023 13:41

Hello Pascal,

Indeed, the approach with deserializing the report would not for your case. However, that was just one of the possible approaches for this issue.

Another workaround would be to download the report, edit its XML content and then re-upload it. All of this should be possible through the Web Report Designer's Asset Manager - Sharing resources within the Web Report Designer - Telerik Reporting.

Additionally, in order to avoid this problem in the future, I recommend using report parameters for values that will be used in multiple places in the report and that will need to change at some point - Report Parameters at a Glance - Telerik Reporting. It may be not easy to edit already existing reports to use report parameters but even if that is the case, this approach for report designing should help for future reports. When a report parameter is used, only a single place needs to be edited in order for all expressions that depend on that report parameter to be affected.

With that being said, we do wish to improve the UI and UX of the Web Report Designer, however, we believe that this is a rare scenario and implementing an XML editor in the Web Report Designer widget would not be appreciated by many. This is especially considering that the TRDX report format exists and there are many text editors out there which provide amazing support for editing XMLs such as Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, etc.

We may revisit this request in the future if it attracts more interest and there are more users who can benefit from this change but for now, we plan to keep this request as Declined.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,
Dimitar
Progress Telerik

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Pascal

Posted on: 13 Oct 2023 13:54

Thank you for your response, unfortunately, I can't use "Deserialize from XML".

I want to change this from a feature request to a perspective change request.

Most answers I get on this site assume I have access to the source code. I only have the web report designer to work with and I do not have access to add or change any code. I've hit the same issue on a previous question I had when most people suggested that I add a user-defined function, which is impossible since I don't have access to the underlying source code (from Telerik or the server hosting our implementation of Telerik).

Is it possible that Telerik builds tools and features with the assumption that a user only has the UI of the web report designer to work with?

I can program but on this project, the implementation and management of Telerik are done by another team which I don't have direct contact with.

ADMIN

Dimitar

Posted on: 13 Oct 2023 12:29

Hello Pascal,

Thank you for the provided information!

The first two cases can be covered by deserializing the report - Deserialize from XML, and then looping through the properties of the Telerik.Reporting.Report instance. There item collections of the report, and its child items, have methods such as Find(Type, Boolean) where you may find all child items with a certain condition and then edit their properties in code, without having to look at the XML.

However, the third case in indeed supported only by editing the report XML directly but that should not be a huge problem when working with TRDX reports as they are easier to edit in any text editor.

Implementing an XML editor in the report designers would require a substantial amount of work and we do not think it is warranted considering that most scenarios are covered by the APIs that we provide for working with reports - Telerik Reporting API Reference - Telerik Reporting API Reference Documentation.

For the reasons stated above, we have decided to decline the request.

Regards,
Dimitar
Progress Telerik

Pascal

Posted on: 02 Oct 2023 15:09

@Dimitar thank you for educating me on the [.TRDX] file format. Below you will find a few examples of what I've had to do while working on reports.

Trying to see all values at a glance that influence the location of a visual in the report.
1. "The paragraph start is not centered correctly in the export. How can I see all locations, paddings, sizes, bindings, ... which could be the cause of the uncentered issue?"
When I need to apply a group/bulk update to values and or expressions.
1. The database has been updated and I need to update all references to [field.x_cordinate] so that they now reflect the new field name [field.x].
2. I have 30 textboxes that I need to update static text. [='Distance from center of mass: ' + field.x] to [='Distance from COM: ' + field.x]
When I need to resolve a versioning issue.
1. "The same report was forked and worked on by two different users at the same time. Trying to determine all differences between the two reports so that they can be merged back into one without the loss of work."

I have had to do all three while working on various reports and having a way to do so localized within the web designer would save a lot of time. On a surface level, it seems that many of these could be solved by designing the report with better "code reuse" but please just assume that I couldn't be done.

Actual Example:

Google Maps has a limitation of 10 numerical pins on their static map.
I have a business requirement to have 30 numerical pins per map and each report can have multiple maps.
I created a map sub-report to be used in the main report.
In this sub-report, I created a pinless map image and 30 panels which each include an image and text field to represent the pins on a map.
Using Web Mercator I determine the pixel location of where each panel should be located.

With my current knowledge, I have not found a way to build the report in a way so that I could reuse the calculations for one pin for all pins.

The reason for this is that the bound location in which the pin can appear is the same for all pins and every way I have found to reuse "code" also prohibits its content from being presented within the same bound location.

[Component] = [x pixel coordinate w.r.t. the maps left corner, y pixel coordinate w.r.t. the maps top corner]

Panel1 = [0,0]

Panel2 = [3,3]

Panel3 = [2,2]

Panel4 = [0,3]

Panel5 = [3,0]

ADMIN

Dimitar

Posted on: 21 Sep 2023 14:23

Hello Pascal,

Could you please share some examples of scenarios where you needed to directly edit the report XML to fix an issue? We are trying to get a more concrete idea of why this could be helpful to the users, and in what scenario it would be required.

Also, the report definition has another format besides TRDP which is TRDX. The TRDX extension saves the report as XML so you can open it with a text editor directly, without having to use a zip archiver. You can save the report as TRDX in both the Standalone and Web Report Designer.

Thank you for using Telerik Reporting!

Regards,
Dimitar
Progress Telerik