Building a Reusable Reporting Framework

Summary

In this chapter, you learned that developing against a reporting framework helps you make reports quicker, more accurately, and with more consistency. You learned how to make search forms and how to toggle between a simple and advanced search form using the reporting framework. You also built a reusable paging component that is far superior to the built-in paging component available on the GridView control. Plus, you explored the performance to functionality trade-offs regarding data binding in the PreLoad versus the PreRender method, and you saw how to allow for either scenario using the BindInPreLoad property.

Creating a reusable reporting framework takes a lot of time, effort, and thought, but it definitely pays off in the long run. No doubt, you’ll continue to create search pages reports, so you might as well not reinvent the wheel each time you do. This chapter has given you a better understanding of the thought process and design considerations that go into building reusable components and frameworks for reporting.