Dynamic Columns and Designer Reports - Part Two
DynamicPDF Designer is a powerful graphical editing tool for creating a DLEX XML specification that, when processed, creates a PDF document. You can also programmatically create a DLEX specification to format a report dynamically. Here, we show how to dynamically create a columnar report.
This post is part two of a two-part blog post. In this post, we programmatically add columns to a DLEX from (almost) scratch.
In the last post (Dynamic Columns and Designer Reports - Part One), we modified an existing DLEX file to remove and move columns in an existing DLEX document. But many times, you might wish to create a DLEX programmatically from scratch. Here, we illustrate making a DLEX file dynamically from a bare-bones DLEX document.
Creating and modifying a DLEX from scratch is tedious and error-prone. If possible, you should use DynamicPDF Designer Online.
We start with a bare-bones DLEX file, report-with-cover-page.json, and use the DynamicPDF API C# Client library, available on GitHub or as a NuGet package.
- dotnet-client on GitHub
- DynamicPDF.API on NuGet
- client libraries documentation
We use the client library to create a PDF using the pdf endpoint. We also use Microsoft's System.XML namespace.
