Hierarchical data sources

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The data sources we have looked at, are relational, that is, they come from a relational DBMS (often called RDBMS). FastReport also supports other kinds of data - the hierarchical data sources. Such data sources come from so-called business objects, which are often used in applications to represent a relational data sources as a .Net classes.

 

The only way to add a hierarchical data source in your report is to register it programmatically. It will be discussed in the "Programmer's manual". Now we will look at some differences between ordinal and hierarchical data sources. In the figure below you can see two data sources, "Categories BusinessObject" and "Products". As you can see, the "Products" data source is contained within its parent, "Categories BusinessObject":

 

businessObject

 

This means that, these two data sources are related to each other and can be used in the "master-detail" report type. You can also use each of these data sources separately in a "simple list" report type.