The Full Form of RDL is‍ Report Definition Language.

Report Definition Language is a standard proposed by Microsoft for defining reports. RDL is an XML application primarily used with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. RDL is usually written using Visual Studio, although there are also third-party tools; it may also be created or edited by hand in a text editor.

Report Definition Language (RDL) is an XML representation of a SQL Server Reporting Services report definition. A report definition contains data retrieval and layout information for a report. RDL is composed of XML elements that match an XML grammar created for Reporting Services. You can add your own custom functions for controlling report item values, styles, and formatting by accessing code assemblies within report definition files.

RDL promotes the interoperability of commercial reporting products by defining a common schema that enables the interchange of report definitions. Any protocol or programmatic interface that works with XML can be used with RDL. RDL is:

• An XML schema for report definitions.

• An interchange format for businesses and third parties.

• An extensible and open schema that supports additional namespaces and custom elements.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a server based scalable and extensible platform for authoring, deploying, executing and managing reports based on a variety of data sources. SSRS allows us to create interactive, tabular, graphical (using data visualization controls) or free from reports from relational, multidimensional (using MDX or DMX) or XML data sources. Furthermore it allows you to view/export your reports in a variety of formats. You can set it to create report snapshots, which show data at a point of time or you can even subscribe to your published reports.

The scalability part of the platform comes from the fact that you can have multiple report servers for scale out deployment, set up in the Network Load Balancing (NLB) or some hardware based load balancing infrastructure for load balancing, whereas the extensibility comes from the fact that SSRS provides web services (APIs) for authoring, managing and customizing report processing and rendering programmatically. Apart from that, SSRS reports are defined in Report Definition Language (RDL), which is nothing but Extensible Markup Language (XML) adhering to a defined report definition language schema. In this article we are going to dive into this RDL and see some of the elements that you will notice in your report’s RDL.