Field and variable selection in Web Report Designer

English Forum
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1

Hi,

We would like to use the Web Report Designer, but we are facing issues with loading fields and variables.

To provide some background, our database and the ASP.NET server with the combit controller (WebReportDesignerController) are located on different machines. Because our database is quite large (~1000 tables and many columns), it’s not possible to load the entire database as fields and variables. We are using a custom data provider (implementing IDataProvider) for loading data.

What we would like to achieve is to allow the user to select which fields and variables they would like to include when using the designer. We need the option to allow providing different fields and variables for each newly created or edited design. When using the local Windows designer, we solved this by showing a custom form to the user where they can select the necessary fields, after which we would initialize the LL instance and show the designer of the selected design.

We would like to migrate to the Web Report Designer, but we cannot use the same solution because of the repository mode. If you create or open a design, there is no possibility of user interaction as the WebReportDesignerController handles everything, so we cannot show our selection page here. We also tried adding fields and variables runtime, after the designer is shown to the user, but the designer UI wouldn’t reflect the changes to the data source.

Do you have any idea show to solve this?

2

Hi Kristof,
welcome to the forum. You could pre-switch a view here to allow the user to make this selection.

3

Hi Thomas,
I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean by pre-switching. Does this mean it’s possible to show a custom view to the user after creating a new design and before the designer is opened? Could you describe it with a bit more detail?
Thanks!

4

@combit, are you able to assist us in this matter, or is there someone else who can provide help? Without the capability to dynamically reload fields in the Web Report Designer, we will be unable to continue using LL in the future.

5

We’re taking a closer look at this right now. As soon as there is new information here, I will post it.

6

We would suggest the following. First create a new view in which the user can select the data source. Then open the corresponding report in the Web Report Designer.

Please note that if you now want to create a new report in the Web Report Designer, for example, only the data source selected at the beginning will be available to you. Your new view with the data source would not be visible here.

You can also block the corresponding menus (New, Open …) in the Web Report Designer using the ProhibitedActions class.