ActiveReports provides three independent ways to export a report to different formats:
- Rendering Extensions: You can use the Render method in Rendering Extensions of the PageDocument class to render a page report and RDL Report to Image, Html, Pdf, Xml, Word and Excel formats.
- Export Filters: You can use the Export method of the corresponding ExportFilter class to export a section report, page report and RDL Reports. Exporting in Section Report is only possible through Export Filters.
- Transformation Device: You can use the Render method in Rendering Extensions of Page Document class using ExcelTransformationDevice to render an RDL report to Excel format.
The following table illustrates the supported export formats for section, page and an RDL report.
Click the ✓ mark to see the implementation of the corresponding Export format.
| Export formats | Section report | Page report | RDL report | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTML: Export reports to HTML or MHT formats, all of which open in a Web browser. | Rendering Extension | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Export Filter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Pdf: Export reports to PDF, a portable document format that opens in the Adobe Reader. | Rendering Extension | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Export Filter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Rtf: Export reports to RTF, RichText Format that opens in Microsoft Word, and is native to WordPad. | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Word: Export reports to DOC, a format that opens in Microsoft Word. | Word HTML (.doc) | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Text: Export reports to TXT, plain text format that opens in Notepad or any text editor. Export reports to CSV, comma separated values, a format that you can open in Microsoft Excel. | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Image: Export reports to BMP, EMF, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, and PNG image formats | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Tiff: Export reports to TIFF image format for optical archiving and faxing. | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Excel | Export Filter(XLS, XLSX) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transformation Device - Data(XLS) | ✘ | ✘ | ✓ | |
| Rendering Extension - Layout(XLS, XLSX) | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Xml: Export reports to XML, a format that opens in a Web browser or delivers data to other applications. | ✘ | ✓ | ✓ | |
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Note: When exporting to Excel, use Rendering Extensions when the purpose of export is to get greater layout accuracy and use Transformation Device when the focus is on exporting data. |
See Also