Creating your first report with NRapid

In this post, I’m going to build a very basic report with NRapid to show some records from the Categories table in the Northwind database. The goal of this post is provide a sneak peak of the reporting capabilities of NRapid.

The first thing we have to do in order to work with NRapid, is configure the database connection in the app.config file. Once this setting is done, we will be able to let NRapid to take care of the data access.

To create our first report, we just need add a class that inherits from NRapid.Core.Reporting.Report and implement two abstract members.

The first one is a method called ConfigureReport, wich will be invoked by the report engine at run time and will allow us to add tables, groups, footers, etc. to the report.

The second is a property where we have to specify the report's title.

In this case, we need to show the whole list of categories from the Northwind data base, we are not filtering any data, so we are just going to ignore viewdata parameter (it’ll be covered in upcoming posts) and write a SQL query and add the table to the report. As you can see in the image below, we can use the NRapid session to go to the data base and fetch the records, it’s really easy.

The last step is executing the report, which can be done by using the NRapid Report Manager.

And the report should look something like this

So that’s it for now, not too bad for less than then lines of code ;)

In upcoming post, I’ll be covering how to use the view data to provide filtering capabilities.

You can get the source code of NRapid from here

And the sample app from here

The Northwind database is available from download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23654

Comments

How to create MS Word documents from Office templates using C#

The OpenXML SDK allows you to do pretty much anything you want with office files such as Excel, Word, etc… While many people like this library, I found it complex, unintuitive and poorly documented, not to mention the awful xml format that uses under the hood to represent the documents, styles, etc. So I decided not to use it and build my own solution. If you, like me, don’t like that library, you will find in this post an alternative approach to build word documents from templates using c#. A neat trick to work with Office is to use the macro recorder to understand how things work. The macro recorder allows you to start a macro, do something by hand, stop it, and then take a look at the generated VBA code. Once you do this, you are pretty much set. This is how it looks the template I’am going to use. Note: save the file as a Word template (.dotx) This is the code to create Word documents from C#: By running the code, you should get a document that looks...

Migrating an ASP.NET MVC 4 app from Azure websites to WinHost

About a week ago I've to migrate an ASP.NET MVC 4/EF5 application from Azure websites to WinHost. While the process was really smooth, there were some caveats related to database connections that I want to share with you. Create and setup the ftp profile on VS and configure the connection string was really easy, WinHost provide you those values and there is nothing special here. But once you deploy your website and try to see it online, you may get the “yellow screen of dead” with the message: "A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)" Assuming you wrote the connection string properly, this happens because you cannot use the default connection name in your web.c...

How to replace text with images on Word documents using C#

This post it’s a reply to a question I got from a previous post that shows how to work with Word templates from C# code . If you haven’t read it, I recommend to do so because I’m not going into details here. But basically it was about how to create a Word document from a template and perform same text manipulation. So, the question from Marcel Kieboom was “Do you know if it would be also possible to replace one of the words with an image which is locally stored?” The answer is yes, and this is how you can do that. Based on the same convention I had used in the previous post, I should have a template like this: What I’m trying to do here is replace the text [angus-young] for an actual pic of Angus. The technique I’m using it’s pretty common on web sites and basically consist in have an image with a matching name for each keyword I want to replace and then create the image path dynamically. This is the C# code to do that. * When I execute t...

Amiralles's Blog

Search This Blog