Addition to the VisibleInXXX attributes family for controlling available types and fields in the application UI

With v16.2.6 and v17.1.3, DevExpress.Persistent.Base > VisibleInReportsAttribute  can be applied to a business class property as well. When the VisibleInReports attribute is applied to a business class property, it specifies whether or not the target property is visible in the Report Designer field list.

BTW, with the introduction of the Dashboards Module, VisibleInDashboardsAttribute was added as well. I hope you did not miss it as well.

How to copy or clone an existing report

Today I've updated a related Support Center article where I listed several possible ways of accomplishing this task. 

I would appreciate it if you describe in comments which approach # you are using yourself or describe your own solution, if it is not listed there. Thanks in advance!

New and updated help topics in version 16.2.4

Recently, Dennis has published a huge list of changes introduced in XAF documentation in the previous major update (16.2). In this post, I would like to overview another set of changes in XAF documentation introduced with the 16.2.4 minor update of XAF.

How to easily register many predefined reports using the ReportsV2 module

I wanted to repost a solution for a scenario logged by our old customer Mario Blataric in the past:

"...Also, there is one more thing - report registration. Currently, every V2 report needs to be registered in Module.cs. That's also fine for 10-20 reports, but when you have 1000 lines of code for just registering reports ... not fun.

Give Report properties like Caption, IsInPlace, AutoRegister and other required properties and just do registration automagically if AutoRegister = true (if for some reason someone wants to add report which doesn't want to be accessible through Reports class). "

Here is a possible solution description from the corresponding Support Center ticket:

While in XAF we cannot add new properties like Caption, Category, IsInplace, ParametersObjectType to the base XtraReport class from our shared DevExpress XtraReports library (essentially because these properties will have meaning only in XAF solutions and will not make much sense in non-XAF applications), 

it is possible to implement a custom .NET code attribute with all the required options:

Check out an example demonstrating a possible way of integrating Snap reports in an XAF WinForms application

The example integration shows how to store DevExpress Snap reports layout in business objects and show a list of these objects, as this is done in the built-in Reports module. The main tool for working with these reports is a custom Snap designer form. Underlying business objects can be configured using custom buttons from this form. It is also possible to show a read-only preview form using corresponding actions.

You can download the actual test project and research the example implementation from here: 

https://www.devexpress.com/issue=T164798 

Developing the new Reports module

You are probably aware that we have a very popular feature request for our XAF Reports module:

Reports - Make it possible to easily use XtraReports designed in Visual Studio.

It is primarily about allowing you to easily reuse regular XtraReports created in Visual Studio in an XAF application

I must say that nothing has already prevented you from displaying regular reports in XAF in exactly the same way as you would do in a non-XAF app, but of course the XAF reporting is not only about that: our built-in module also integrates reports into the application navigation and menu systems, enabling end-users to create reports at runtime and store them in the database, adds the Show In Report command to list and detail forms, as well as adding many other features requested by our customers.

I wanted to inform you that the aforementioned request is planned for version 13.2, and we are currently working on it.

Overview
Here is a very short overview of the new features: