Getting the relative path to the rdlc report in my winform app.

Question

I am automatically creating a PDF from some of our reports in a month-end process. I am running into a problem where ReportViewer.LocalReport can't find my report. Within the project, the report files are in "(project root folder)/Reports/report.rdlc". How do I set ReportViewer.LocalReport.ReportPath so I can reference my report file? I would rather not set the full path because I don't know where it would be installed when installed on the client machines.

Answer 1

The path is always relative to your "current directory" which in most cases is exe file- change rdlc files so that they are copied to the destination folder instead of embedded in resources(usually that's how this is done). The path in your project doesn't matter.

Answer 2

You can store the reports in a "resources" file, and by using an Assembly reader of the given .dll / .exe where the "resource" file is embedded, can read as a streaming reference. Then set your report to the embeded stream to get the report definition.

Special note. If your report has nested sub-reports, the report will fail unless you also set in your LocalReport subreport definition another such reference to your subreport .rdlc file.

Answer 3

Use the Application.StartupPath property, it always points to your EXE.

  using System.IO;
  ...

     string exeFolder = Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.StartupPath);
     string reportPath = Path.Combine(exeFolder, @"Reports\report.rdlc");

You'll want to make sure the report gets copied to your bin\Debug\Reports folder as well so it will work in the IDE.