| name | paginated-report |
| description | Author, validate, publish, and test Power BI paginated reports in the RDL format. Automatically invoke when the user mentions "paginated report", "RDL", ".rdl", "Report Builder", "Power BI Report Builder", "SSRS report", "PBIRS", "Power BI Report Server", or asks to "create a paginated report", "build an invoice/statement report", "make a print-perfect report", "connect a paginated report to a semantic model", "edit an RDL file", "publish an .rdl", or "render a paginated report to PDF/Excel". |
Paginated Reports (RDL)
A paginated report is a print-faithful, multi-page document (invoice, statement, operational list, regulatory filing) defined by a single .rdl XML file. The .rdl is plain, hand-editable, diff-friendly XML holding everything: data sources, datasets, parameters, page setup, layout, and expressions. Power BI Report Builder is a Windows GUI over this same XML, so a coding agent edits the artifact directly.
This skill teaches the RDL format and its unwritten rules, how to connect to data, the rendering quirks, and a dev loop that confirms a report actually renders. It is the home for everything RDL. For interactive screen-first reports (PBIR), use reports:create-pbi-report instead; see "Is paginated the right tool?" in references/report-structure.md. This is for Power BI paginated reports (the Power BI service / Fabric), not classic SSRS; the format is shared but the environment differs (see references/differences-with-ssrs.md).
Before building: interview the user
A paginated report is a fixed-format document where the data source, parameters, and delivery target are expensive to change later. Before authoring anything, run a requirements interview using references/questionnaire.md. Treat it as a dynamic, two-way conversation, not a form: research the data source yourself (inspect it, run candidate DAX, read a similar example), bring concrete options and a quick Enter Data draft for the user to react to, and follow the threads that matter rather than reading a fixed list. Settle the essentials (purpose, data source, target workspace and capacity), reflect back a short brief, then build against it and refine the rest as the draft takes shape.
