sonar and roland r8 mk 2 drum machine

What I'm reading is you can record a preset pattern but not your own patterns? 
 
Are you driving the drum machine by setting Sonar as the midi clock source? 
 
I have a old 505 and I set Sonar as master and set the drum machine in midi sync. 
You need both midi out and midi in connected ( obviously) 
Arm a midi track, sellect the patch I want to play and start recording. 
The pattern will be recorded into the midi track and follow the tempo set in Sonar. 
I dumped all my patterns this way. 
Make sure the midi track output is dirrected to a soft synth and NOT the midi output or you'll get a loop back and double ,triple etc notes all out of time. 
This will also work for whole songs stored in memory. The 505 held around 4 songs. 
 
If for some reason you were expecting the actuall sounds the Roland made to play from the midi track that's not how it works. To record the sound of the Roland you play the midi track and output via midi to the drum machine and record the analog outputs. Please don't take this in a wrong way if you understand this, but you'd be supprised how many people think midi contains sound. 

Uggghhh. Is that the only way?

I know there aren't any instrument definition files for the r8 or r8 mk2. That being the case, I was thinking if I could pull up the particular drum bank I wanted from the machine itself and record it into sonar that way, but it doesn't seem to work like that.