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This is related to https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=205265 but a little bit different. 205265 assumes that you will take create a single document that combines other documents. The idea on this bug is to build a report design that is composed of other report designs. The individual report designs would each be stand-alone components capable of running on their own. The designer would then simply add a reference to the component report design in the composite report. The UI for this does not have to be that strong, basically you would have a grid in the Composite design. In the grid cell you link to the component design. All that really needs to show in the composite UI view would be the component design icon. When a report design is used in this fashion, the content would only come from the BODY section of the report and all of the page elements from the component design would be ignored. I see one of the main Use Cases for this to be the use of the Design Engine API to dynamically assemble the composite report at runtime. So it would make sense that care be taken to make the DEAPI for this as simple as possible.
Can we use library to achieve most of the usage for this one? There is issue of name conflict, scripting conflict, etc.. which has been addressed with the library feature.
You could use library interface. The difference is that you are dragging a complete report into the design. If you open library interface, would you give people the option of selecting only portions of a report. I don't think you want to go there. So if in the lib interface .rptdesign should up as an addable item to a report design, that would work. I don't think you want to support the over-ride function that typically shows up in a library component. In my experience, when you start over-riding report designs that are used as library components, you end up building really brittle hard to maintain reports. The core goal is that all design work is done in the individual designs. The master design is very simple and is simply a composite of the other designs.
