Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, 2nd Edition

Report Definition Language

The Report Definition Language (RDL) is an XML structure defined by Microsoft for storing Reporting Services reports. RDL is an element-centric XML structure. That is to say, RDL primarily uses elements to store information, rather than attributes.

The two types of elements within RDL are parent elements and property elements. Parent elements contain other elements, whereas property elements define a property of the parent element. The name of the property is the same as the name of the element. The value of the property is the contents of the element. For example, if the LeftMargin property of the report is set to one inch, the element containing that property would look like this:

<LeftMargin>1in</LeftMargin>

Property ...