If you love the out of the box reporting capabilities of Civil 3D you can stop reading this post and move on to the next one (may I suggest Brian Hailey’s recent post?), if not then read on.
If you find that you are exporting information from Civil 3D to Excel or Word and then modifying the look of the reports, then you probably should look into report customization. If you used a competing product that had a certain look to them and it isn’t available in Civil 3D and you want the same look, then you may want to create a custom report to produce the same look as the previous software package. If you want to extract information (maybe calculating the number of rings required for all of the manholes in a sewer network) from the Civil 3D model and present it in a specific format you may want to look into report customization.
Autodesk has been nice enough to provide the source code for the report so you (or someone for you) can create new reports.
You can revise both the XML reporting and .NET reports that ship with the product. If you didn’t know they 
To modify the XML reports you can edit the various xsl and xml files located in this folder:
C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Reports\xsl
You can edit the files using Notepad or a one of the xsl editor programs that are available. At this point I’ve only used Notepad so I can’t recommend an xsl editor (although I do know the full version of Microsoft Visual Studio doesn’t let you work with them).
Once you understand the structure and how the files are linked together it isn’t that hard to modify them. But unless I’m doing something quick and easy I’ll create the report using .NET.
Autodesk has also provided all of the source code for the .NET reports. They are located in this folder:
C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\C3D 2011\enu\Data\Reports\Net\Source
To modify the .NET reports you can use the Microsoft Visual Studio (or another IDE program). The structure of the reports is pretty straight forward and provide a good foundation for creating your own reports.
The other alternative is to have someone else do the customization for you, someone like me. If you are interested you can email me to find out more information.
5 comments:
Thanks for the info. We were able to modify the Parcel Inverse report so that it includes Acres in addition to Sq. Ft.
I want to put a revised .xsl file on a server so other people can use what I have created. What path on their computers do I change to get changes to be automatically updated?
Thanks!
David
In the toolbox dialog box there is a button at the top for the settings. You can change where the XSL reports point at from there. I don't think you can do the same change for the .NET reports due to Window permission issues.
Hi there, i am pretty curious to know ...
How did you create your different directories for the Report Manger ?
Here is how: http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2014/05/adding-arborescence-to-toolbox.html
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