Report Model Formatting Not Propagated to Report
I'm sorry for the confusion around this and the delayed response... personally I try to monitor these forums at least once a week and I'm not sure how I missed this particular post. The background for this issue is that report models were originally designed for RB1.0 and nearly all of the capabilities of report models are exposed in the RB1.0 interface. When we built RB2.0 we decided to start over and address the dominant piece of feedback we received regarding RB1.0: that most of our customers were more interested in a full-featured stand-alone reporting client that could connect to any data source, rather than the RB1.0 experience limited to report models. In making this decision we hoped to include report model capabilities in RB2.0 as well, and we were able to include a query designer for report models but features to consume other model metadata (such as data format, column widths, default sorting, Clickthrough links, etc.) did not make it given our limited resource constraints. Stepping back from the resource practicality though, the RB2.0/3.0 interface is more complex and does not really target the low-end user that RB1.0 aimed for. Adding the model metadata features would be a nice convenience but doesn't really address the fact that RB2.0/3.0 is fundamentally more complex than the RB1.0 experience. Given this, we continue to ship RB1.0 with the expectation that most customers using report models are continuing to use RB1.0. Hopefully this addresses your questions. Why is format available in the model and is it still useful? It is there for RB1.0 which continues to use it. Will newer RB versions consume this metadata? Possibly--we're always welcome to customer feedback. To be honest, this is maybe the second time I've heard anyone ask about this. The best avenue for providing this type of feedback to the product team is Microsoft Connect which provides a formal mechanism for us to collect and respond to feedback.
June 4th, 2010 3:57am

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