Customizing RDLC Reports

This article explains how to customize the built-in RDLC reports that ship with Quantify. You need some basic familiarity with the RDLC Report Designer in order to accomplish the tasks in this article. For more information you can do a web search on how these reports work. In order to complete these steps, you also need Quantify 2017 installed and running.

There are two types of reports in Quantify, RDLC reports and a newer style report. The toolbar for the RDLC reports look like the screen grab below. Reports with this toolbar are capable of being customized. We are in process of converting reports to the newer style. As we do, we will enable them to be customized within Quantify itself.

Step-by-step guide

You can modify reports by opening them in Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. This is a free product from Microsoft.

Install Visual Studio and Report Designer

1, Install Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.

2. In the Windows section of Installation Options, all you need is .NET desktop development. With this selected, in the summary section to the right all you need is .NET Framework 4 - 4.6 development. Both are shown below. Choose these components and then click Install.

3. Start Visual Studio and log in as necessary

4. Download and run the Microsoft Rdlc Report Designer for Visual Studio. This is a vsix package that installs an addon to Visual Studio.

Copy Quantify Reports

The default reports are located in the install folder for Quantify: C:\Program Files\Avontus\Quantify Client\Reports\. You can make copies of the reports you need from this folder, or simply copy all of the reports over to this folder. The later is useful if your reports are set to A4, as Quantify has permissions to modify the reports in this folder.

Modifying Reports

To modify a report, start Visual Studio and open the report. From here you can freely modify the report. If you somehow have made a mistake or want to revert the report to the original, you can simply re-copy the rdlc files again. Note that some reports have sub-reports, which are contained in a separate file. You'll be able to see the file name in the main report.

You may also want to turn on the Toolbox (View menu) to add controls to your report.

You can associate .rdlc files with Visual Studio, so that when you double-click on them they automatically open in Visual Studio. To do this, right click on the .rdlc report file and select Open With, then choose Visual Studio Version Selector.

Example

This example shows how to modify the At Job for Selected Customer report, which is located in the Customers tab.

This report is named CustomerOnRent.rdlc, and we have it copied to the correct folder as shown below.

Opening this report in Visual Studio, we can change the Description heading to DESCR. to shorten it.

When previewing the report, we can see that it now has this new description.