Integrating reporting functionality into applications is a very easy task using TX Text Control. The out-of-the-box ribbon tab "Reporting" provides all required features to add merge fields, repeating blocks and special fields.

The TXTextControl.DocumentServer.DataSources.DataSourceManager class is designed for handling all existing kinds of data sources that can be used with the TXTextControl.DocumentServer.MailMerge class.

After creating an application that uses the ribbon interface and the pre-designed ribbon tabs, your form should look similar to this:

The ribbon tab TXTextControl.Windows.Forms.Ribbon.RibbonReportingTab class has the TXTextControl.Windows.Forms.Ribbon.RibbonReportingTab.DataSourceManager property which returns the connected DataSourceManager.

The DataSourceManager object provides methods to load data from various sources:

• LoadAssembly
• LoadDataSet
• LoadDataTable
• LoadJson
• LoadObjects
• LoadSingleObject
• LoadXmlFile
• LoadXmlString

Consider the following classes that should be used as a data source:

public class Report
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public List<Sale> Sales { get; set; } = new List<Sale>();
}

public class Sale
{
    public Customer Customer { get; set; }        
    public Product Product { get; set; }
}

public class Product
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
}

public class Customer
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Street  { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public int Zip { get; set; }
}

The following code creates a new object and loads it into the DataSourceManager using the TXTextControl.DocumentServer.DataSources.DataSourceManager.LoadSingleObject method.

Report report = new Report() { Name = "Test Report 2018" };
report.Sales.Add(new Sale()
{
    Customer = new Customer()
    {
        Name = "Customer 1",
        City = "Charlotte",
        Id = 1,
        Street = "6672 Test Street",
        Zip = 27781
    },
    Product = new Product()
    {
        Name = "My Product 1",
        Price = 7782.12m
    }
});

DataSourceManager dsManager = ribbonReportingTab1.DataSourceManager;
dsManager.LoadSingleObject(report);

The drop-downs to insert merge fields and repeating merge blocks are filled automatically with the available values.

The DataSourceManager provides the TXTextControl.DocumentServer.DataSources.DataSourceManager.Merge method to merge a template with the current data to implement a preview functionality. The following code saves the template in a byte array, merges the template with data and loads back the resulting document into the TX Text Control:

// save the document
byte[] bDocument = null;
textControl1.Save(out bDocument, TXTextControl.BinaryStreamType.InternalUnicodeFormat);

// create the preview
IList<byte[]> bResults = ribbonReportingTab1.DataSourceManager.Merge(bDocument, 1, textControl1);

// load the preview into the Text Control
textControl1.Load(bResults[0], TXTextControl.BinaryStreamType.InternalUnicodeFormat);