Patent ID: 7873902

Claim:
A method of transforming a report from a first version to a second version comprising: exporting existing report objects in an existing first version report into XML format to a transformation tool; in the transformation tool, detecting mini-patterns within the existing first version report wherein detecting mini-patterns further comprises examining parent-child relationships within the report and comparing the parent-child relationship to known parent-child relationships to determine if the parent-child relationship is similar to a known parent-child relationship if there is a match, the type of the report is determined based on the type of the report having the known parent-child relationship; tabularizing controls from the existing first version report; transforming parts of the existing first version report comprising: building an in-memory object model for parts of the existing first version report; and serializing the in-memory object model into a report definition language client (RDLC) file in XML format.