Pentaho Reporting comes with two flavours of XML definition formats. The Simple-XML format has been designed to be used by humans. It has a very simple structure and covers most of Pentaho Reporting's featureset. It is save safe to say , that 95% of all developers will not need the remaining feature set. The Extended Report Definition Format is an XML-based serialization format for Pentaho Reporting. It is not meant to be edited by humans and its structure resembles the internal data structures of Pentaho Reporting. It is possible to create Extended Report Definition documents from any Pentaho Reporting object. The report-writer module contains all code necessary to serialize the object into a valid XML-stream.
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