Reports and DevExpress XAF: Build Cross-Platform .NET Apps

• May 27, 2025
• 2 minutes to read

Applications that require Reporting functionality are very similar in nature. In a nutshell, a typical line-of-business application allows a user to browse, edit, and export relational data based on user permissions. DevExpress creates an application framework that lets you build such applications with ease: Cross-Platform .NET App UI (XAF).

XAF allows you to keep your focus on business logic. The framework generates application UI automatically - whether for desktop (Windows Forms) or the web (ASP.NET Core Blazor). Reporting capabilities and many other extra modules are included. All this functionality is available to you as part of our Universal Subscription.

Read Tutorial: Get Started Run Demo: ASP.NET Core Blazor Demo

Get Started with Reporting in XAF

If you use Reports in an XAF application, the following capabilities are available to you:

• Integrated Report Designer
• Report definition storage in the application database
• Support for SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and other providers that work with EF Core
• Automatic Report Viewer UI
• Report data filtering
• Controls that allow users to download exported documents
• User/role access permissions for individual reports

Refer to the following articles for additional information:

• In-Depth .NET 6+ WinForms & Blazor UI Tutorial (Employee Manager): describes how to build an application that targets .NET 6+ framework using Windows Forms and XAF’s ASP.NET Core Blazor UI.
• Create Predefined Static Reports: describes how to create a report and make it available in XAF UI.
• Predefined Users, Roles and Permissions: describes how to configure permissions for your report container and ORM data models/your EF Core entities.