It is possible to set the ObsoleteReason, ObsoleteState and ObsoleteTag properties on report object columns (and data items).

That's good, but there is no way for administrators/users to know that their report layouts are still using obsoleted report object columns.

Because of that users may be in for a surprise when suddenly they cannot render their report layouts anymore, because the extension developer removed obsoleted report columns with a new update of the extension containing the report object columns.

It would first of all be good if we had a way of detecting it ourselves, for example by having:

(1) Information about the ObsoleteState in the XmlPart of the report object, so we can at least use that to detect it.

With that I mean, include it on the 'column definitions' that you can get from

WordXmlPartAsText := Report.WordXmlPart(MyReportID, true);

Where it would be great to have an attribute/property that shows us that the report column has been obsoleted, e.g.:

MyColumnName

(or something similar)

(2) Have some sort of "Report Column Metadata" table which would report back the ObsoleteState of report object columns.

Similar to how we have metadata tables which include the ObsoleteState for table objects and table fields.

Ideally, it would be great if BC can also somehow automatically raise attention to the administrator/user that layouts that have been rendered are referencing obsoleted columns.

That could be via a notification, telemetry (maybe even 'daily telemetry'?), and/or somewhere else.

NOTE: Please consider this for both *dataitem* and *column* nodes.