Specify the Report Designer View

• Aug 18, 2023
• 2 minutes to read

The End-User Report Designer for WPF supports a tabbed multi-document interface (MDI), which allows you to edit multiple reports simultaneously with each report opened in its own tab. The Report Designer’s Classic and Browser Views deliver the tab-based navigation functionality using different user interfaces.

Report Designer Classic View

In the ReportDesignerClassicView, the tab headers corresponding to report designer documents are displayed above the report editing surface. The tab panel contains an arrow and cross button at the top right corner. The first button provides a dropdown menu that allows you to select reports, while the second button allows you to close the current report. You can also navigate between reports by clicking the corresponding tab headers. To create new reports, use the New Report button in the Toolbar.

Report Designer Browser View

The ReportDesignerBrowserView (the default View) is a modern web browser-inspired View intended to provide a compact and intuitive multi-document interface. In this View, the tab header panel is embedded at the top of the Report Designer window.

You can create new reports using the plus button located inside the tab panel next to report headers. Each of these tab headers provides a cross button for closing the corresponding report. Click tab headers to navigate between reports.

Specify the Report Designer View

You can manually specify a required View in one of the following ways:

• At design time, you can select a view type using the Report Designer’s smart tag or the View property in the Properties Window.

  

  This changes XAML code automatically as demonstrated below.

  XAML

  <Window 
       xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
       xmlns:dxrud="http://schemas.devexpress.com/winfx/2008/xaml/reports/userdesigner" 
       ...
      <dxrud:ReportDesigner x:Name="reportDesigner">
          <dxrud:ReportDesignerClassicView/>
      </dxrud:ReportDesigner>
  </Window>
  

• At runtime, you can create a new instance of the required object (ReportDesignerClassicView or ReportDesignerBrowserView) and assign it to the ReportDesigner.View property in the window’s constructor.

  C#

  using DevExpress.Xpf.Reports.UserDesigner;
  using DevExpress.XtraReports.UI;
  
  //...
  public MainWindow() {
      InitializeComponent();
      // ...
      reportDesigner.View = new ReportDesignerClassicView();
      reportDesigner.OpenDocument(new XtraReport());
      //  ...
  }
  

  VB.NET

  Imports DevExpress.Xpf.Reports.UserDesigner
  Imports DevExpress.XtraReports.UI
  
  '...
  Public Sub New()
      InitializeComponent()
      ' ...
      reportDesigner.View = New ReportDesignerClassicView()
      reportDesigner.OpenDocument(New XtraReport())
  End Sub
  

  Note

  Specify the required view before opening a report in the Report Designer (using the ReportDesigner.OpenDocument, ReportDesigner.NewDocument or ReportDesigner.DocumentSource member).

  The view assigned in code is not applied to the Report Designer if you already specified the view at design time.