Providing data in List & Label is done with data providers. These are classes that implement the interface IDataProvider from the combit.Reporting.DataProviders namespace. Within this namespace a lot of classes are already contained which can act as a data provider. A detailed class reference can be found in the .NET component help.
For data formats that are apparently not directly supported, a suitable provider is found in most cases anyway. Business data from applications can generally be passed through the object data provider. If the data is present in comma-separated form, the data provider from the "Dataprovider” sample can be used. Many other data sources support the serialization to XML, so that the XmlDataProvider can be used. If only a small amount of additional information is to be passed, it is possible to do it directly. A sample is shown in paragraph Database Independent Contents.
Once List & Label is bound to a DataProvider, it supports the following features automatically if applicable to the data source:
•real data preview in the Designer
•report container and relational data structure
•sortings
•drilldown
The following overview lists the most important classes and their supported data sources.