Report Definition Language

Microsoft's reporting format used in SqlReportingServices

Spec in PDF format:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/7/d/47d7d117-9f91-49ad-98d5-46aa6f3251a8/RDLDec03.pdf

From the spec:

In today's database reporting market, most vendor applications use a proprietary format for representing the definition of a report. In addition, vendors that provide a report execution environment usually only support their own design tools. For customers, this means that reports cannot be easily moved between different reporting implementations and that there are few options for choosing new tools that work with their existing execution environments.

Goals of Report Definition Language

The goal of Report Definition Language (RDL) is to promote the interoperability of commercial reporting products by defining a common schema that allows interchange of report definitions. To encourage interoperability, RDL includes the notion of compliance levels that products may choose to support. This is discussed in the appendix to this specification.

An important aspect to understand is that RDL is a schema definition, not a programmatic interface or protocol like HTTP or ODBC. RDL does not specify now report definitions are passed between applications or how reports are processed. Also, RDL is meant to be fully encapsulated; meaning that successfully interpreting an RDL document should not require any understanding of the source application.

RDL is designed to be output format neutral. This means that reports defined using RDL should be able to be output to a variety of formats including web and print-ready formats or data focused formats like XML. It is expected that the in process of generating different output formats, products may represent RDL constructs slightly differently or ignore certain constructs entirely. For example, a product generating a textual format may choose to ignore images in the report.

http://www.fyireporting.com/index.html

An Open Source reporting implementation that is based on RDL