A Guide to Our ActiveReports.NET End-User Report Designer for the Web

March 06 2024

ActiveReports.NET stands out as a robust reporting engine built on .NET, offering many benefits for developers, end-users, and stakeholders. At the core of its capabilities lie the Report Designers. We craft our designers with user-centric features and a familiar, easy-to-navigate UI.

HTML5/JS-based Report Designer

The ActiveReports.NET End-User Report Designer for the Web is based on the HTML5/JS technology stack. Our intuitive designers come embed-ready, packed with a powerful UI and countless features to build your dream reports. Anything from summarized data reports to granulating down to individual data points, ActiveReports.NET has your reporting covered anywhere on any device.

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ActiveReports.NET Web Designer

Our Report Designers focus on the most essential element: the Design Surface. The surrounding features are organized to give the user a feeling of familiarity. Utilize ActiveReports.NET's array of report-ready features by dragging and dropping our controls and data regions from the left to the design surface. Create tables, charts, and more via built-in wizards to guide your report creation.

Below, you can view our design surface with some helpful notes.

End-User Report Designer

Design Pane & Report Controls

On the far left side of the design surface, you can see ActiveReport.NET's Design Pane. This pane contains the:

Explorer: Display the report's tree structure
Group Editor: Manage the groups in a data region
Layers: Reorder, hide, lock, or remove report layers

In the same Design Pane, you can see some of our drag-and-drop report elements, which include:

Control	Description
TextBox	Most commonly used feature to display textual data or create actionable text.
CheckBox	Display Boolean data alone or alongside textual data/static text.
Container	Graphical element to contain and group other report controls or images.
Line	Graphical element to visually mark boundaries or highlight specific report areas.
Shape	Graphical element to leave a visual mark with various shape options.
Table of Contents	Display an organized hierarchy of report bookmarks and labels with page numbers.
Image	Display any image file from an external source, database, or embedded image.
List	Data region that repeats any report control for every record in the dataset.
Table	Displays data in columns and rows. Rows will repeat for each row of data.
Tablix	Combination of Table and Matrix data regions.
Chart	Graphical data region, which represents data using encodings.
Bullet	Linear gauge that can bind to data and set best, worst, and satisfactory values.
Barcode	Renders scannable barcodes in 39 popular symbologies.
Formatted Text	Displays data and can format selected areas of text in different ways.
Sparkline	Displays a data trend over time in a small inline graph (line, area, stacked bar).
Subreport	Display and filter data from a separate report.
Banded List	Data region with freeform bands to place report controls.
Input Field	Provides editable fields within an exported PDF report.

Web Designer Interface

At the top of the designer, from left to right, you can utilize the following features:

Undo/Redo: Retract or reapply changes on the design surface.

Folder: Contains options to create, open, or save reports. It also contains the version information in the About option and the help documentation link in the Help option.

Save/Save As: Save your reports.

Preview: Generates the report to review within the designer.

Ribbon Tabs: The Designer window consists of the following:

File: Contains options to create, open, or save reports. It also contains the version information in the About option and the help documentation link in the Help option
Home: Includes report editing options like cut, copy, paste, and delete. It also provides shortcuts for text formatting, such as font, font size, font color, and horizontal or vertical text alignments
Report: Options are to add, delete, move pages (in Page report), add or remove header and footer (RDL report), and change report themes
Parameters: Contains the design area for designing a custom parameter panel. The controls in the panel have default properties like name, label, and default value

Properties: Displays the properties of the selected report element. If more than one element is selected, only their common properties are shown.

Data: Provides options to add, manage, and remove data sources, data sets, and parameters. It also displays common values such as current date and time, page number, total pages, and more.

Across the bottom of our designer surface, you can see the following:

Designer Buttons: Change the appearance and behavior of the design area:

Grid: Show or hide the grid. Grids help in the accurate placement of controls
Snap to Grid and Snap to Guides: When the Snap to Grid option is enabled, the selected control snaps to the grid at set locations. Additionally, the selected control snaps to the vertical or horizontal lines relative to other controls' positions. This is helpful for consistent control spacing and alignment
Zoom support: Using the zoom in (+), zoom out (-), or clicking the current percentage, you can change the design area's zoom level. You can also use shortcuts [Ctrl] + [+] to zoom in and [Ctrl] + [-] to zoom out
Ruler Units: Change the ruler measurements for a report to centimeters (cm) or inches (in)

Level Up Your Reporting

By referencing this guide, you are ready to navigate your way around our End-User Report Designer for the Web and start designing better reports.

ActiveReports.NET is a complete and versatile reporting solution, empowering users with our feature-rich interface, intuitive ad-hoc reporting capabilities, and a wide array of data visualization tools. The End-User Report Designer is the ideal choice for users ranging from non-technical to seasoned developers.

Bring the power of ActiveReports.NET to your web and desktop applications for seamless, interactive, and visually appealing reports.

Ready to Dive into ActiveReports.NET? Download Our 30-day Free Trial Today!