This video demonstrates how you can use the Report Design Analyzer to improve the quality of your reports.
If you have been creating reports for some time now,
you may already know that there are many situations where a report, control, script, or data do not behave as expected.
And it is not always evident what the issue is and how to avoid it.
Let me illustrate this with one of the most obvious cases.
Here we have a report where two labels overlap each other.
Now what happens if we export this report to Excel?
You can see that the first label is cut off and its borders are out of order.
This is what often happens with overlapped controls.
And this is why we want to keep you on the safe side.
How can you avoid this issue?
In addition to the highlight on overlapped controls
you get message XRE004 in the Report Design Analyzer window for each of the overlapped controls.
You can see that each control gets selected once you double-click its message in the Report Design Analyzer
or click the control's name in the Source column.
This way you can quickly navigate to the control.
Click the plus icon to expand the message.
A hint is shown that describes how you can correct the issue.
Also, in the Visual Studio Report Designer
the window is called Error List, this is one of the Visual Studio's standard tools
message codes appear as links
You can click this link to navigate to a DevExpress Reporting documentation page
that gives some more background about why the message appears in your report.
The Report Design Analyzer detects a whole list of issues related to a report
report bands, controls, scripts, data, or external content like images or PDF documents
The messages are broken down into three categories
Errors (most critical issues that usually prevent an item from being displayed correctly).
Warnings (less severe situations where an item may not behave as expected).
And messages (these are usually hints and best practices on how to design reports).
You can filter the Report Design Analyzer messages by these categories
or select messages that have to do with Report Layout
Report Creation
or Report Scripts
In Preview, the Analyzer window is hidden to free up the visible area for the report.
However, the bell icon in the status bar continues to indicate the issue counter.
You can click the bell to bring up the Analyzer window back to the screen.
Additionally, if a new issue occurs during the preview (for instance, an external image file has become unavailable)
you see a fly-out box above the bell
this helps you understand that something is going wrong.
This is how the Report Design Analyzer helps you troubleshoot your reports and improve their quality.
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