Active Reports 6 - XML Data as a Datasource

This week my challenge was to use XML data as a datasource for an Active Report. I'm pretty new to Active Reports. For the most part, I don't really like any reporting tools, but that is probably because I want it to do more that it can.

So when I figured out I needed to use XML for a certain report, I hit the Active Reports forum to look for examples. Most examples showed files with XML as a datasource. You hook up the datasource object to the file location. However, I had straight XML data that I was dynamically pulling from the database so I needed to hook up the Xmldatasource object to that data.

My report was a Master-Detail report, and I was supplying the xml data to the subreport. And of course, this is in C#.

The trick was loading the xml into an XmlDocument. The other trick was figuring out the RecordSetPattern, that took a few guesses. Looking back it's clear.

Sample XML data:

<books userId="1157" bId="1001">
<book id="3333" majorVersion="2" minorVersion="0">
<title>Junk</title>
< rating positive="6" possible="10" percent="40" />
</book>
<book id="4444" majorVersion="1" minorVersion="0">
<title>My Module</title>
<rating positive="5" possible="10" percent="50" />
</book>
</books>

//getting data from database as xml
XElement booksXml = User.GetBooks(member.ID, _b.ID, 0);

//create an xml datasource for the subreport
DataDynamics.ActiveReports.DataSources.XMLDataSource xmlDS = new DataDynamics.ActiveReports.DataSources.XMLDataSource();

//load data
XmlDocument xDoc = new XmlDocument();
xDoc.LoadXml(booksXml.ToString());
xmlDS.FileURL = null;
xmlDS.RecordsetPattern = "//book";
xmlDS.LoadXML(xDoc.InnerXml);

//set subreport datasource
this.subReport1.Report = new BookDetail();
this.subReport1.Report.DataSource = xmlDS;


And beyond that the final trick was referencing the xml data in the subreport. For any attribute that was in module, I simply referenced the attribute name in the datafield property with that @ symbol in front of it (like @id), and for elements just the element name (like title). The tricky part was the nested node inside there, rating. To reference an attribute from grade, I had to put ./rating/@percent in the datafield.

And I also found that trying to run a calculation to figure that percent was beyond me, so I just modified my xml query to include calculating the percent for me, it just seemed easier. And that's what I mean when I say I don't like reporting tools...