In a Page Layout, you design reports at the page level without any banded sections. This lets you place controls anywhere on the report.

In a Page report, controls do not change in size based on the data, but you can use an Overflow Place Holder to handle any extra data.

In a RDL report, controls grow vertically to accommodate data.Controls can grow and shrink, you can set up interactive sorting, you can set up drill-down reports in which detail data is initially hidden, and can be toggled by other items, and you can add drill-through links to other reports and to bookmark links within reports.

In a Section Layout, you design reports in banded sections. A PageHeader, Detail and PageFooter section appear by default, and you can remove any but the detail section. Right-click the report and select Insert to add other section pairs like ReportHeader and ReportFooter, or GroupHeader and GroupFooter.

A report section contains a group of controls that are processed and printed at the same time as a single unit. All sections except the detail section come in pairs, above and below the detail section. When you use group headers and footers, the detail section processes for each group, and then the next group processes a group header, related details, and group footer. See Grouping Data for more information.

You can hide any section that you do not want shown by setting the Visible property of the section to False.

To create a report, a user must select one of the following templates containing the report layout. See Basic Concepts and Install ActiveReports topics for details on available report templates and how to access these.

• RDLX: This is an XML-based proprietary file format that provides custom extensions to the Report Definition Language (RDL) files used by SQL Server Reporting Services. These are stand-alone files that you can process without compiling them into your application. You can customize the report through the Script Tab by embedding script in the report.
  See this msdn page for more on RDL report.
• VB or CS: These are code-based reports, and are saved as C# or Visual Basic files that are compiled into your applications. They have corresponding code views similar to Windows forms and provide a design and coding experience in line with Visual Studio. This format is ideal for developers who are comfortable with coding in .NET programming languages and would like to use the extensive event-based API provided by ActiveReports in the code-behind rather than design view. You may also use the scripts in the Script Tab instead of the code behind.
• RPX: This is an XML-based proprietary file format that the ActiveReports engine can process without compiling it into an application. Instead of Visual Basic or C# code behind, you can customize the report with script embedded in the report XML using the Script Tab. You can also use an RPX file with script as a stand-alone file in a Web project.

Additional File Formats

See the following list of file formats available in each layout.

Features comparison between report types