Reuse Of Report Elements

I am working on a project developing a fairly large number of reports with a team of developers. Many of these reports have common elements and code, such as common headers with user-selectable colors. Additionally, many of the common parts of the reports are at mockup stage currently, and many features will have to be added to the reports as time goes on.



We're attempting to create a generalized framework that will minimize the duplication of effort as we develop these reports, and as we go back and modify or fix them later.

What is the best way to approach this?



My first attempt was to create a report template and base all the reports off of the same template. That was fine for the first pass, but as we need to make changes later, they will not be propagated to the already existing reports.



My second attempt was to have each componant of that template reference a subreport, so that changes to the actual report template will be minimized as we go forward. This works great for minimizeing work, but it appears that you lose many features with the use of subreports, and there seems to be a pretty serious performance impact as well. I have posted about one such issue here: Pagination



If anyone has pointers about how to go about this, and where I should start, they would be greatly apreciated!