Tutorial: Generating RDL Using the .NET Framework

This tutorial illustrates how to write Report Definition Language (RDL) to a report definition file using the XmlTextWriter class. The writer provides a fast, forward-only way of generating XML, thus RDL, and helps you to build report definition documents that conform to the RDL specification. The XmlTextWriter writes to a stream rather than using an object model such as the XML DOM, and so gives better performance.

Typically, you use an XmlTextWriter if you need to write XML as raw data without the overhead of a DOM. The XmlTextWriter is an implementation of the XmlTextWriter class that provides the API which writes XML to a file stream. The XmlTextWriter class provides several methods that are useful for creating a report definition file. In particular, the following tutorial shows you how to construct a report definition file using the WriteStartElement, WriteAttributeString, WriteElementString, and WriteEndElement methods.

What You Will Learn

During the course of this tutorial, you will complete the following activities:

• Create an application using the Visual Studio Console Application project template.
• Add a connection to the AdventureWorks sample database.
• Write code to retrieve a list of fields for the data source.
• Write code to generate a simple report definition file that can be used to build a report.

Requirements

To complete the tutorial, you must have the following:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or a similar Microsoft .NET Framework-compatible development tool.
• The AdventureWorks sample database installed to an instance of SQL Server 2005. The samples are not installed automatically during setup, but you can install them at any time. For information about installing the samples, see Installing Samples.

Estimated time to complete the tutorial: 60 minutes

Tasks

Lesson 1: Creating the RDL Generator Visual Studio Project

Lesson 2: Creating a Connection to the Sample Database

Lesson 3: Retrieving a List of Fields for the Report Definition

Lesson 4: Creating Code to Generate the Report Definition File

Lesson 5: Running the RDL Generator Application (VB/C#)

See Also

Concepts

Reporting Services Tutorials

Other Resources

Report Samples (Reporting Services)
Installing AdventureWorks Sample Databases and Samples

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance