Many of the report writer application today use a proprietary format to represent and format the data of their reports. This problem is that in order to view and distribute reports to an enterprise this requires a specific set of tools. The Reports Definition Language (RDL) is designed to ensure interoperability between all compliant report writers and viewers. RDL defines a common XML schema that defines a report, data formats and included images. As an XML schema RDL provides an extremely comprehensive set of features. In an effort to make it easier to implement, RDL defines a compliance level that makes it easier for enterprises to understand each of the defined feature sets a vendor chooses to support.

RDL is defined as a schema specification and doesn’t specify how reports are passed between applications or how specific reports are processed. RDL is defined to specify structure and as an XML construct it can easily be transported over HTTP or other network transports. RDL is designed to be fully encapsulated, which enables any application that successfully interprets an RDL document shouldn’t need to understand the source application that created it.

The XML based syntax of RDL uses the namespace definition http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQLServer/reporting/yyyy/mm/reportdefinition. In this schema definition the “yyyy” and “mm” represent the name and year of the specific RDL instance. Designed as an open extensible syntax, RDL categorizes reports into the following elements.

1. Data – the information and the query used to obtain the data. As well as the structure of the data.
2. Layout – The specific formatting information that describes how the data is presented.
3. Properties – the meta-data properties that include things like the author, images and other types of data.

It isn’t necessary to understand RDL to write reports using the Visual Studio interface. It is important to understand it though as a base component for application that may need to either view or generate this type of report data.

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