Potential limitations of Microsoft reporting technologies in dealing with child collections without foreign keys to its parent

Question

I have an XSD schema defining a parent element (e.g. Car element) containing a collection of child elements (e.g. Wheel). Within this child element, it has its own properties. However no foreign keys/ids are defined on the child element (e.g. Wheel) to refer back to its parent element (e.g. the Car element).

I want to generate a report for XML instance complying to this schema showing all the contained Cars and its Wheel(s) properties. Using MS reporting services, I can create a car.rdlc and within itself refers to a subreport, wheel.rdlc. However my understanding of MS reporting technologies is that it assumes one can pass an id to the subreport (e.g. wheel.rdlc), in which case I don't have it available in the defined XSD schema. Is my understanding correct? If yes, is there good alternatives to get around this limitation?

Thanks,

---

Jun HY

Answer 1

I ended up deriving new classes with extra properties to track the parent ID and self ID. Once parent child IDs are linked up properly through the hierarchical data, I successfully generated reports with subreports.

---

Jun HY