Devexpress Download Page: Create a Master-Detail Report

To create the Categories-Products master-detail report, do the following.

Add a Detail Table

1. Start MS Visual Studio (2008 or 2010).

2. Open the Windows Application with the data-aware report, which was created in Lesson 2 of this tutorial.

3. This report is already bound to the Categories table from the Northwind database (nwind.mdb file located in the directory where you installed DevExpress demos). To create a master-detail report, you must add the Products table to the nwindDataSet's schema. To do this, right-click nwindDataSet1 in the component tray, and choose the Edit in DataSet Designer... option from the context menu.

4. When the nwindDataSet.xsd designer is opened, expand the Server Explorer pane, which shows all data connections that are currently available in Visual Studio. For this, on the View menu, choose the Server Explorer option or press Ctrl+Alt+S.

5. In the list of available Data Connections, locate the one that points to the nwind.mdb file, then select the Products data table and drop it onto the designer. This will add the Products table to nwindDataSet.

6. When the Products table is added to the dataset schema, the appropriate master-detail relationship between Categories and Products table is automatically created by Visual Studio. To apply these changes, click Save on the toolbar.

Create a Detail Report

7. Switch to the report designer and right-click the report to invoke its context menu. In this menu, choose the Insert Detail Report/CategoriesProducts option to add a new detail report. In this instance, the detail report's DataSource property is set to nwindDataSet1; the DataAdapter property - productsTableAdapter; the DataMember property - Categories.CategoriesProducts.

8. Right-click the detail report and choose the Insert Band/Group Header item in the context menu. This will add the GroupHeaderBand to the detail report.

9. To make the detail report look more professional, set the GroupBand.RepeatEveryPage property to true and the GroupHeaderBand.GroupUnion property to WithFirstDetail. If these settings are applied, the Group Header band will be repeated on every report page with its group, and its position will be chosen in such a way that it will be always printed with at least one Detail band below it.

Customize the Detail Report's Layout

10. Add two XRTable controls to the Group Header and Detail bands of the detail report. To do this, open the DX.12.1: Reporting toolbox tab and select XRTable. Then, in the GroupHeader band's content area, click and hold down the left mouse button while dragging the mouse cursor across the Detail band.

Note that you can add cells to these tables, adjust their size, and set the font of the text shown in the cells. For instance, set the second table's XRControl.Borders property value to Left, Right, Bottom to avoid double borders between repeating table rows.

11. Then, bind the second table's cells to the required data fields,..