ReportingCloud provides an extensive API to manage templates. You can upload, list, count, delete and download templates from the ReportingCloud template storage. But it also provides endpoints to retrieve data structure information from a template.

The endpoint template/info returns information about the template including the merge field and merge block structure in a hierarchical form.

https://api.reporting.cloud/v1/templates/info

After calling this method with the template name as a request parameter, it returns a JSON string with the template information similar to this:

{
        "templateName": "sample_invoice.tx",
        "mergeBlocks": [
                {
                        "name": "item",
                        "mergeFields": [
                                {
                                        "dateTimeFormat": "",
                                        "name": "qty",
                                        "numericFormat": "",
                                        "preserveFormatting": false,
                                        "text": "«qty»",
                                        "textAfter": "",
                                        "textBefore": ""
                                }
                        ],
                        "mergeBlocks": []
                }
        ],
        "mergeFields": [
                {
                        "dateTimeFormat": "",
                        "name": "yourcompany_companyname",
                        "numericFormat": "",
                        "preserveFormatting": false,
                        "text": "«YOURCOMPANY_COMPANYNAME»",
                        "textAfter": "",
                        "textBefore": ""
                },
                {
                        "dateTimeFormat": "",
                        "name": "invoice_no",
                        "numericFormat": "",
                        "preserveFormatting": false,
                        "text": "«invoice_no»",
                        "textAfter": "",
                        "textBefore": "#"
                }
        ]
}

The returned object is of type TemplateInfo which contains all fields at root level and all nested merge blocks including contained merge fields:

TemplateInfo Object

MergeBlock Object

MergeField Object

In most cases, hierarchical data is used to design the template. But there are also use cases where data is shaped based on the data structure in a template. The work flow would be similar to this:

• Retrieve template information
• Create data object based on contained data structure
• Merge template with newly created pre-shaped data object

To illustrate how to iterate through the hierarchical data, the following code shows how to fill a tree view in .NET using the .NET ReportingCloud wrapper:

private void addBlockToTreeView(List<MergeBlock> blocks, TreeNode node)
{
    foreach (MergeBlock block in blocks)
    {
        TreeNode curNode;

        if (node == null)
            curNode = treeView1.Nodes.Add(block.Name);
        else
            curNode = node.Nodes.Add(block.Name);

        foreach (MergeField field in block.MergeFields)
        {
            curNode.Nodes.Add(field.Name);
        }

        if (block.MergeBlocks != null)
            addBlockToTreeView(block.MergeBlocks, curNode);
    }
}

The following screenshot shows the populated tree view in a sample .NET Windows Forms application:

If you want to test this on your own, register today for a free 30-day trial license.

Happy coding!