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Report Explorer

is topic gives you a brief overview of the Report Explorer tool and its main features. To learn more about other report designer elements, refer to the Report Designer  document.

Report Explorer is a helpful tool which provides easy navigation through report elements, either at Visual Studio design time or in the End-User Designer. You can use it when building a report to quickly access all the elements of a report and their properties, and to see the whole report's structure.

The Report Explorer is shown in the Visual Studio IDE, together with other IDE windows when you edit a report at design time. It can be moved, sized or docked in the same manner as other IDE windows, and usually has the following look.

Note
The Report Explorer window is added to the IDE when the XtraReports suite is installed. Note that after this window is closed, you can re-open it via the XtraReports Menu.

The Report Explorer displays a created report's structure as a tree. Report elements in the tree are displayed in a vertical order, which corresponds to their vertical position in a report. When you choose an element in the Report Explorer tree, the selected report element receives focus, so you can edit this element and its properties.

Usually, a standard report consists of several report bands  containing report controls . All child nodes in the tree view of the Report Explorer window are contained in their corresponding parent nodes (and at runtime they can be accessed via the XRControl.Controls property of the container control). As the Report Explorer shows the report's structure, note that there are special rules for report building (for instance, XRControl objects should be contained in Band objects, not vice versa).


The image below illustrates these relations.

The Report Explorer supports dragging-and-dropping of its elements between different nodes. This means that items representing report controls can be dragged and dropped onto band items or onto XRPanel control items. The corresponding report control will then be moved.

Additionally, any item in the Report Explorer can be right clicked to invoke the context menu for this report element (the same as in the Report Designer). Use this menu to quickly perform used functions for the report element. An example of this menu is shown in the image below.

If there are any data-bound controls in a report, they will be marked in the Report Explorer with the yellow database icon, as shown in the image below. Note that when a mouse pointer hovers over a bound item, a tooltip displaying the binding information is shown.

See also