Introduction

This chapter will show some advanced techniques that involve changing the XML specification of a report outside of Report Studio. This is a common practice amongst experienced report writers. It often saves a lot of time and also provides some functionality that is not available in Report Studio.

You should preferably have an XML editor application for this. I have used Visual Studio for this. The advantages of using an XML editor are visual aids to help XML editing, automatic tag completion, tree like expand-collapse functionality, and easy search and replace. However, if you don't have one, you can also use any generic text editor for these recipes, for example, Textpad or Notepad.

If you don't know anything about XML at all, it would be worth reading about it on the Internet. There are websites like www.xmlfiles.com and www.w3schools.com/xml that are good for basic understanding and practice. After reading about XML and following the recipes step-by-step, you will not only...