RDL Editor - Getting Started

The RDL Editor edits Business Central RDLC report layouts visually, inside the BC web client. No export, no renaming .rdlc to .rdl, no Report Builder, no re-upload — open, edit, save.

Opening a layout

Search for Report Layouts in Business Central.
Select a user-defined RDLC layout. (Built-in Microsoft layouts are read-only — duplicate one first with the standard New Layout flow, choosing RDLC as the format.)
Run Edit RDL Layout → Open in Editor. The action is only enabled for RDLC layouts; Word and Excel layouts are rejected with a clear message instead of being mangled.

The screen

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ (BC action bar: Save · Test Print)                                    │
│ Title ●            ↶ Undo  ↷ Redo        −  100%  +  Reset  Snap      │
├──────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────┤
│ Tool │  ┌─ ruler ─────────────────────────────────┐ │ Properties /   │
│ box  │  ├─ Page Header ───────────────────────────┤ │ Structure tabs │
│  ↖ T │  ├─ Body ──────────────────────────────────┤ │                │
│  ⛶ ╱ │  │   (items, tables, images, lines …)      │ │ (everything    │
│  ▭ ▦ │  ├─ Page Footer ───────────────────────────┤ │  about the     │
│      │  └─────────────────────────────────────────┘ │  selection)    │
└──────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────┴────────────────┘

The ruler shows inches with the page margins shaded — the shaded zones are not printable.
A ● after the title means unsaved changes; closing the page then asks for confirmation.
The right pane has two tabs: Properties (the current selection — or the report/page setup when nothing is selected) and Structure (a tree of every item; see chapter 2).

Saving and testing

Action	How	What happens
Save	Ctrl+S or the page's Save action	The layout is validated and stored; a toast confirms the save actually happened (the dirty ● clears only on confirmation)
Test Print	The page's Test Print action	Saves, then immediately runs the report with this layout — request page and all — without touching your configured layout selection

Test Print is the truthful preview. The editor renders faithfully, but fonts, the real dataset, and the PDF renderer live in Business Central — for document layouts, the PDF is the truth.

Undo

Everything is undoable: Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y (or the toolbar buttons). A whole drag is one undo step; rapid arrow-key nudges coalesce. There is no "are you sure?" friction on ordinary edits — undo is the safety mechanism. (Destructive edits that would break other parts of the layout get a real warning — see chapter 7.)

The one rule that governs everything

If a field is not in the report's dataset, the layout cannot use it.