Template Syntax

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A typical template for LINQ Reporting Engine is composed of common document contents and tags that describe the template’s structure and data bindings. You can form these tags using just running text that can occupy multiple paragraphs to be more descriptive.

A tag body must meet the following requirements:

  • A tag body must be surrounded by “<<” and “>>” character sequences.
  • A tag body must contain only text nodes.
  • A tag body must not be located inside markup document nodes such as StructuredDocumentTag, CustomXmlMarkup, or SmartTag.

A tag body typically consists of the following elements:

  • A tag name
  • An expression surrounded by brackets
  • A set of switches available for the tag, each of which is preceded by the “-“ character
  • An optional tag header used for syntax error checking as explained further
  • An optional comment providing a human-readable explanation ignored by the engine
<<tag_name [expression] –switch1 –switch2 ... # optional_tag_header // optional_comment >>

Particular tags can have additional elements.

Some tags require closing counterparts. A closing tag has the “/” character that precedes its name. This tag’s name must match to the name of the corresponding opening tag.

<</tag_name>>

Note – Tag body elements are case-sensitive.

Tags consisting of opening and closing parts can be nested to each other. In case when nested tags are of the same type, it can be harder to determine which closing part relates to which opening part, especially given often edits of a template. To simplify this, you can use tag headers as follows.

<<tag_name ... #header1>><<tag_name ... #header2>>...<</tag_name #header2>><</tag_name #header1>>

While building a report, the engine checks matching of headers for corresponding opening and closing tags and indicates an error in case of a mismatch, for example, because of a wrong closing tags’ order.

During runtime, after a template syntax tag is processed by the engine, it is typically removed. This can lead to a situation where a paragraph containing the tag becomes empty if it has no other content. If such a paragraph is unwanted, it can be optionally removed by the engine. You can use one of the following ways to achieve this:

  • Remove all such paragraphs by applying the ReportBuildOptions.RemoveEmptyParagraphs option (see Removing Paragraphs Containing Only Template Syntax Tags for more information).
  • Selectively remove some of such paragraphs by prepending every corresponding tag’s name with an exclamation mark as follows. 
      <<!tag_name ...>>

This section includes the following topics:

Introduction to LINQ Reporting Engine in C# LINQ Reporting Engine or Mail Merge in C#