When using SF we have the BindingField which is based on the BusinessObject property of the control, sometimes I have controls which I would like to bind to a new form's property and no business object, so I can reference this property instead of the control itself.



In this case if I use a SF control, can still use its BindingField property with not BusinessObject? or should I just add a regular property and assign the control value in the GET/SET?

Edhy Rijo

Hi Guys,



"What I mean is how are you able to drag and drop fields on your report?"

Yep. You end up with a tool bar item called XtraReports and in there is a field from which you drag and drop. BTW - this field list can extended via creating calculated fields within XtraReports. I've had no need (yet) to create custom fields in the BO.





"Are you setting your relationships for child table in the dataset itself"

Yes. The proc contains all the data that the report needs





"and if so do you need to turn off any parent/child metadata in the BOs so they don't interfere?"

Charles, I'm not sure what you mean by this. Perhaps you are referring to the DDT which we don't use.





The one thing that I really like about XtraReports is that all custom code (e.g. special sub totals, special formatting) can be written in VB.Net (our language) or C#. Very easy to leaverage those skills for reporting whereas in Crystal Reports we had to use a rather clunky scripting language. Plus form controls (such as Charts) can simply be dropped on a report.



On the down side because we use VB.Net we can't ship report updates by loading a contol file, i.e. in Crystal Reports we could change a report and simple copy the .rpt file to a customer. Now we have compile our reporting project and copy the entire exe to the customer. We thought this would be a real pain but it has proven to be a problem. If we had gone down the XtraReports scripting path, rather than VB.Net for custom code, then we could have copied a designer file in the same manner as we did with Crystal Reports.



And finally - we all know that the support from the SF guys is great - they always seem to go the extra mile. Well - DevExpress support is also excellent.



Cheers, Peter