Create a Master-Detail Report with a Detail Report Band in the VS Report Designer
- 3 minutes to read
This tutorial illustrates how to display hierarchical data in a master-detail report using nested DetailReportBand elements. This approach allows you to create a report by database queries that are tied by a master-detail relationship on the data source level.
An alternative way is described at Create a Master-Detail Report with a Subreport in the VS Report Designer.
Tip
To get started with this tutorial, open an existing reporting application or create a new application (the Add a Report to Your .NET Application section explains how to create a reporting application on different platforms).
Do the following to create a master-detail report:
Add a SQL data source and provide it with a master-detail relationship as described in the Bind a Report to a Database topic. In this example, we will use the Categories and Products data tables of the sample Northwind database to establish the Categories-Products master-detail relationship.
The Field List will be updated to reflect the new hierarchy of the report’s data.
To create a detail report, right-click the report’s Detail band. In the invoked context menu, point to Insert Detail Report and click “CategoriesProducts”.
If the DetailReport is properly bound to the data, the following properties of the created DetailReportBand are set automatically:
- the XtraReportBase.DataSource property should be set to sqlDataSource1.
- the XtraReportBase.DataMember property should be set to Categories.CategoriesProducts;
Drag the CategoryName and Description fields from the Field List window and drop them onto the Detail band.
Drop the ProductName and UnitPrice fields from the Field List’s CategoriesProducts section onto the DetailReport‘s Detail1 band.
Note
Note that these fields must be taken from the CategoriesProducts relationship, and not from the Products table. Otherwise, the report will display only the first record of the Products table for each category, as many times as there are records in each category.
You can convert the dropped labels to a table to simplify control alignment. See the Convert Labels to Table topic for more information.
Your report is finished. You may want to customize the visual style and layout as additional steps. In Visual Studio, you can switch to the Preview tab to preview the report:
Tip
To learn how to make the detail sections collapse or expand when clicking them in Print Preview, see Create Drill-Down Reports.
Create a Master-Detail Report with a Detail Report Band in the End-User Report Designer
Tutorials that explain how to create different reports in EUD Report Designers for WinForms and Web are included in the End-User Documentation online help section: