The rapidly increasing number of web apps has led to a great demand for web-based reporting solutions. We followed this trend with List & Label, and moved the Designer to the web – from version 27 on. One huge benefit, brought by the new Designer: way less effort, because only one front- and back-end needs to be developed and subsequently maintained. Naturally, the development of the new Web Report Designer presented us with technical challenges which we’d like to share with you – maybe knowing about our own learning curve is going to help you with your own projects, too.
PDF is by far the most important export format and one of the targets virtually every user is actually working with. Over the years, we've employed a number of different SDKs and versions of these SDKs in order to write decent PDF files. While the results were excellent already for "normal" cases, there were a couple of restrictions in more advanced scenarios. This has changed in version 26.
The second Service Pack for List & Label 26 has been released and contains many new features and improvements. We have listed them all for you in this blogpost. The individual entries were taken directly from the English Readme.
Thanks to all participants for taking the time to answer our questions. One thing that I can say straight away: your time was well invested. Your feedback has given us many good ideas and suggestions on how we can further improve List & Label and which new features and technologies are important to you. We do not want to withhold the results, so here are your answers from the survey.
The Report Server saw the light of day in 2014. At that time, version 1.0 was implemented using the ASP.NET MVC framework and was based on List & Label 19. But as the number of users increased in subsequent versions, so did the requirements and ideas for new features. Some of the customer requests were difficult to realize with the underlying technology. Many developers have certainly been faced with the same question: What should we do next?
This is a feature many, yet not all printer drivers offer out-of-the-box. As we kept seeing requests to support this directly – here we go. List & Label 26 enables a thorough support for multi-page printing.
The first Service Pack for List & Label 26 has been released. What are the new features and improvements? In this blog post we give you an overview. Each entry was taken directly from the English Readme.
As with every version, we have included a number of minor bells and whistles into the latest version. The most notable ones are:
This blog article covers all the new features and improvements in Service Pack 25.004. Each entry was taken directly from the English Readme.
As a proud platinum sponsor, we just attended the all-virtual VSLive! VirtCon as an exhibitor. For me, it was actually a revisit, although my last VSLive! experience dates back some time ago. I've been to San Francisco in 2002 when .NET 1.0 was first launched by Bill Gates himself. At least the travel wasn't that exhausting this time :).
This has been another community suggestion from our Idea Place. Until version 26, you could only have one copy count for labels. This means that the same number of copies were printed for each and every label. In version 26 you can now adjust this individually, based on the data in your data source.
An often required feature for "this cannot be done" type of problems is looking into the future. Things like "don't print this group if it doesn't contain record xy" or "print a reference to the page number of an item that's printed way later". Before List & Label 26, there was no simple solution to this and the magic had to be done in the application if possible at all. Starting with List & Label 26, we'll introduce a new feature that's aimed at solving exactly challenges like this.
List & Label 26 is gearing towards RTM. We've been blogging about the progress and upcoming new features for some time now. This time, however, I'd like to share some insights into what happens as we shift near RTM.
As with every new version, there's always a lot more "under the hood" that's being added than we're able to document and reveal here in detail. This post sums up a couple of new features and changes for our .NET support in version 26.
This has been another FAQ without a really good answer – how can I get a report with completely different parts like a cover sheet, a table of contents, some tabular reports, some charts and images, then a text block and so on?
The new List & Label Service Pack 25.003 brings support for the new RAD Studio 10.4 and Windows 10 2004. What else is new? We have all new features and improvements for you at a glance. Each entry was taken directly from the English Readme.
Often reports consist of similar, repetitive sections like a number of charts or crosstabs just filtered for different categories but otherwise identical. Or tables and subtables that have a preselected set of columns you want to have wherever this table is used. List & Label 26 now helps you and your users to get rid of the tedious task to maintain such reports and apply changes to all instances of objects. You can add real subreports that contain exactly the required items and maintain those in one single place.
After improving the crosstab's Drag & Drop capabilities in version 24, it was time to overhaul the table's D&D support as well. The last major change here dates back to 2015 – so without any further ado here's what will be added in version 26.
We love Java! List & Label itself has a native C++ API. This API can also be called directly from Java applications via a Java Native Interface Wrapper, which has already been part of the product for ten versions. Over the years, we have implemented many suggestions from the community, for example we have improved the callback interface of the JNI component. Now we are going one step further – do you want to help us to improve the JNI wrapper, too?
The Service Pack 25.002 has some new features and various improvements for you. We give you an overview of what's new and what has improved.
Today, modern reports must be designed for more than just one purpose. In addition, "all" data should be contained as simply as possible – but presented in a clear and structured way. With List & Label such multifunctional reports can be easily realized. Interactive elements allow a single report to cover several scenarios, while selection options further enhance the report. This makes reports more comprehensive and informative and can be easily operated by the user.
The Service Pack introduces new features, various improvements and corrections. The following is an overview of the features and improvements in the Service Pack.
As with every new version, we have updated List & Label in a lot of different places to make it smoother to use, more modern and accessible. So to continue with this tradition, here are some treats in List & Label 25 you might have overlooked so far.
As we all are affected by the infamous COVID-19 outbreak I assume many of you are working from their home offices just as we do. We had the luck (aka foresight) to prepare this early on so we were up and running in less than a day. Nevertheless, once we started, there were a couple of challenges we were facing. I thought I'd share some nuggets here that might be useful to you.
In May 2019, Microsoft announced that it will no longer develop the existing .NET Framework. So the current version 4.8 will be the last release. From now on, the company will concentrate on the further development of .NET Core. For developers, the question arises: Is the release of .NET Core 3.1 a good time to migrate from the .NET Framework? The good news is that you don't have to do without List & Label when migrating.
Creating preview files is all well and good. However, when you needed to access the texts within the preview for post processing, you had to resort to a text export, finding the relevant strings and copying them from there. In LL25, we added a powerful way to extract texts from a preview, directly from within the preview window.
GraphQL was publicly released in 2015 and became quite popular since then. It's used by a number of big web applications like Instagram, Facebook and others.
While for standard tasks the default mechanism for Rscript rendering of List & Label might be sufficient and convenient to automatically generate the png, jpeg or svg chart output from a Rscript on the fly, there might be situations where you simply desire more control.
List & Label has supported a number of text based export formats for quite a while. You can have XML, CSV and layout TXT export in different variants. That way, you can use List & Label as a convenient way to convert your data from one of the supported data sources to something you can use in other applications again. But one very popular format was missing so far that's been around for quite a while: Java Script Object Notation aka JSON.
As promised in our first blogpost about the innovations of Report Server 25, here comes the second part, including some very interesting features like Webhooks, connection string management or import/export of settings.
Version 1.0 of the electronic invoice data format ZUGFeRD for the exchange of invoices has already been supported. For List & Label 25, the specification of version 2.0, officially released in March 2019, is now also supported.
.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.
The combit Report Server celebrates its 5th birthday. Right on time for the anniversary, the product again has some new features to offer. We focused especially on the wishes of our customers.
Continuing our quest to make the table object more versatile and powerful in LL25, we added an important tweak to the way table lines are kept together. Before, you just had the choice between keeping all lines together or none. That means, if the output for a single record stretched over a couple of pages and consisted of several line definitions, there was hardly ever a way to get the wrapping "right".
This has been another great suggestion from our community at Idea Place. While the mail module is quite flexible and can send mails via SMTP, MAPI and XMAPI, and can either use the client's mail dialog or a custom, built in dialog, there was no way to append Outlook standard signatures to the sent mails so far. Microsoft has finally declined the request to add this feature to Outlook's MAPI implementation. So there was room for improvement.
This is another of those "huh, you didn't have that before" features. As a WYSIWYG layout oriented reporting tool, the page has always been king for List & Label. While this is nice in many circumstances, when it comes to reporting for the web or XLS and printing is not planned at all, the result can be unwanted although looking beautiful.
Another step forward in our continuing quest to improve what's already great - our table object. Until LL25, you had to decide which widths you'd like to reserve for your respective columns. While this works out just nice most of the time, sometimes the result is less than perfect.
This is another great addition to the report container's feature set. Until LL25, related tables always needed to have an actual relation on the data source level in order to be usable as data source for sub items. If there was no relation, there was no way to insert the sub item, even if both tables in question had an ID field that would easily allow a custom linkage. In LL25, you can now have relations based on filter conditions.
Multi-columnar layouts for tables are quite popular for newspaper or phone book style reports. Whenever you have just a few actual columns in the table it's handy to use the page's real estate by splitting it in multiple columns. This feature has been around for ages, however it was missing one important setting until LL25.
Complex data is usually processed visually in dashboards in order to be able to capture trends, outliers or up-to-date data at a glance. The design of dashboards depends on important details. These details make the difference between whether the information is interesting for the target group and whether conclusions can be drawn from it or not. For example, a bar chart is better to capture than to work your way through hundreds of table entries. Dashboards are often used incorrectly and are hopelessly overloaded with numerous different charts and gauges, such as traffic lights, speedometers and hardly readable tables.
With List & Label you can export reports in different formats like PDF, Word, Excel and many more. The resulting reports can either be stored directly in the file system or - in .NET - in a stream, in order to transfer them manually into a database, a document management system or similar. Reports can also be automatically stored directly in so-called cloud storage services. The cloud storage providers for GoogleDrive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox are available in List & Label for .NET for this purpose.
Microsoft Flow allows you to define your own processes and workflows based on various triggers. More than 200 services such as Office 365, Facebook, WordPress etc. are available for this purpose, which can interact with each other in the workflows (called flows). These services offer actions as well as triggers, such as when a file is created (on Google Drive, DropBox or also on alternative services like e.g. box) or when a mail is received. Each flow has a trigger and may have multiple actions. This article describes how to connect combit Report Server to Microsoft Flow.
It's been a while since the original announcement back in June 2016, but hey, we're finally there. Today marks the release of a brand new VCL component that uses the data provider interface and FireDAC at its core.
Redis is an in-memory key-value database, so a typical NoSQL database. Since its initial release in 2009, it has become quite popular and now is, according to db-engines.com by far the most popular key-value database out there. With the new RedisDataProvider you can now use your Redis database within List & Label or Report Server.
The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard interface description for REST APIs, which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic.
This post belongs to a series of blog posts that are dedicated to the innovations of combit Report Server 24. At this point I would like to recommend the two posts "What's New in Report Server 24, Part 1" and "What's New in Report Server 24, Part 2". Today we are talking about the new native iOS and Android apps for the combit Report Server, which allow you to access the reports on your Report Server directly from your smartphone or tablet. Previously, this was also possible directly via the Report Server web interface, but the new apps offer additional options and a device adapted and fast operation, as you would expect from a native app.
While I've been blogging about the major and most-UI-visible features during the last few months, of course there are gazillions of minor and less visible changes underneath the hood in LL24. This blog post sums up some more reasons to be cheerful.
Since the introduction of our feature portal three years ago, it has become an important driver for our innovation. If you filter for "available in latest version", you'll find some fourty features we've built into the product on your request. So here comes a big "thank you" to everyone participating! Your help, effort and ideas are more than welcome anytime. Of course, we've implemented some of the top voted demands into LL24. One of them has been to enable the customization of the preview window's look and feel.
Extensibility is a first class citizen in the List & Label universe. You can add your own functions and objects to the Designer, enabling complex calculations within your code or custom objects. However, there was one important link missing so far - all this code just runs on the desktop. If your application runs on a server and you're using the Web Designer you're hosed - until version 24.
While List & Label's charts offer a lot of visualization types and are extended almost every version, there are way too many visualization types to support them all. Thus, requests for new chart visualizations keep bubbling up in our feedback portal. On the other hand, Rscript is a well established language specialized for statistical computing and graphics that supports any visualization I can think of. So it absolutely makes sense to add Rscript output to the available chart visualization and include the best of both worlds - List & Label's versatility for report layout and data access and Rscript's deluge of visualization types. And that's just what we did for the Enterprise Edition of List & Label 24.
Over the years, we kept improving our chart engine with each version. We've added Donut, Radar and Treemap charts and offered new layout options. However, if your charts were to be rendered in the browser, the only available formats so far have been PNG or JPEG, leaving you with exactly two options: either have great quality and huge file sizes or a swift download and poor rendering quality. There was no option to combine both (and I'm not thinking "huge download and poor quality" here <g>). In LL24, this is going to change.
A crosstab does a great job in aggregating your data and helps to spot trends and outliers. We've put great effort in enhancing our crosstab support for the last few versions. However, although there's a nice wizard to get you started, usability testing showed that even creating simple crosstabs was still a challenging task for some users. That's something we hope to change with LL24.
Crosstabs and charts have a lot in common. Often I find myself designing a crosstab for e.g. the sales per country. This works fine to get the absolute or even relative numbers. However, to get a visual impression of the fractions for a dashboard, I add a chart 99% of the time that shows just the same data as the crosstab.
Continuing our quest for an improvement of the Designer's refactoring features, it's obvious that finding text alone is only halfway to quickly and easily refactoring your projects to accomodate them to changed field names, table names or other identifier changes. So we decided to take this project one step further and offer a powerful replace feature in LL24.
One of the most wanted features from our feature portal will finally be available in List & Label 24: a powerful find feature for the Designer.
In Version 19, we introduced a new feature called "expandable regions". When activated on a top-level table, this will enable to dynamically collapse and expand the table's sub items in the preview and HTML5 viewer.
So far, it hasn't been possible to export to all of our export formats from the preview window. The simple reason is that we're using the EMF file format internally while the exporters need completely different information that cannot be extracted from the EMF. Thus, we were only able to support image file formats and - of course - PDF, which is created from EMF vector information.
This is the second blog post covering the new features of combit Report Server version 24. I already introduced some new features in the Ad-hoc Designer.
With the help of Javonet, the List & Label .NET component can be easily integrated and used directly from Java – with the usual ease of use you are accustomed to from .NET. With this cooperation, Java customers have easy access e.g. to real data preview in the Designer, drilldown reporting and report parameters to name just a few of the interactive features.
Since version 3 of the Report Server, you can create reports quickly and easily with the Ad-hoc Designer. Since List & Label 23, this feature is also available for .NET developers for integration into their applications. Today I would like to show briefly which customer requests we were able to implement in combit List & Label 24 and Report Server 24 in the Ad-hoc Designer.
Microsoft’s Cosmos DB is a cloud based, scalable database service that has become quite popular since its initial launch in May 2017. I thought it might be a nice idea to check it out and – while I’m at it – see how I can connect my favorite reporting tool to it.
This is the first of two blog posts presenting the new features of our combit Report Server in the upcoming version 24. Since the last version, in which the Report Server has become part of our List & Label developer component, the development teams of both products have been working even more closely together. This enables us to better coordinate the needs of both products, and thus also of our customers.
List & Label's powerful filter options could not be used for all data sources so far. Reason is, especially for web based data sources, it is not possible or feasible to get "all" data first and then filter to the desired subset. The upcoming version 24 comes with a powerful new feature that addresses this very issue: Parametrized Data Sources. It allows to combine data source parameters with actual report parameters in the Designer.
As you may have guessed, by now we are well into working on version 24 of our List & Label reporting tool, which is due to be released this fall. Today I proudly present the first feature preview!
Let's be honest, developing has it's challenges. To meet the ever more diverse demands on applications and technologies, we all rely on a multitude of ressources to make our lives easier. So we, the makers of your favorite reporting tool, thought it's about time to let you benefit from our experience. Below you will find just a small selection of the tools that we can't do without.
As you might know, this year’s Winter Sports Event will start just by the end of the week. I have to circumlocate the actual name of the event as those people really mean “Trademark” when they say it. Let’s call it simply “Games” for the rest of this article, which hopefully should be safe. Anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do some statistics with my favorite reporting tool.
The compilation of the redistributable files of List & Label has been somewhat cumbersome so far. But we listened to the wishes of our customers and developed an easy-to-use redistribution assistant.
While holiday season is approching fast, bringing some well-deserved quality time off work for all of us, I briefly wanted to share some miscellaneous treats in version 23 of our List & Label reporting tool with you.
The Scalable Vector Graphics format has been around for quite a while. The first specification was released in 2001, and meanwhile all browsers offer solid support for SVG. During the years, we've received a couple of requests to support SVG in List & Label. Initially, I was hoping for Microsoft to make SVG rendering support a Windows feature that we could just use. However, that hasn't happened so far. And so we had to come up with a different solution.
The signal ranges are a handy gauge feature to highlight parts of the scale. It enables you to divide the scale e.g. into a green, yellow and red part. That way, you can judge at a glance if a value is "good" or "bad". In LL23, this feature has been extended to charts.
Have you ever wanted to migrate your List & Label projects and data providers to a central webserver to export and view them on an Android or iOS tablet with just a few lines of code? With the upconing new version 23 we have some good news for you!
After adding a number of new chart types in the last versions, most notably Radar, Treemap, Shapefile and Funnel charts, we're adding a small yet very neat property for pie and donut charts to List & Label 23: pie coverage. This allows to define if the pie should consist of a full circle or just parts of it.
No matter which data, using the DataProvider interface you can write your own custom binding. And of course we ship a whole family of providers with List & Label. In LL23, there's a new member of this family that allows your applications to connect to Salesforce data easily.
The .NET DataProvider concept allows to bind to almost any data source. Basically, it mimics a relational database management system containing tables, relations, sort orders etc. However, often you'll find yourself needing to combine data from different sources, e.g. a server log file that contains customer logins and a SQL customer database that contains all pertinent information about the customers.
As promised, today I’d like to report on even more of the updates in Report Server 23. The updates are particularly impressive in the ad-hoc Designer, which provides support for fast creation of simple tables and diagrams. As opposed to the extensive Report Server Designer, only the most important setting options are provided here. In addition, the ad-hoc Designer is likewise available as a separate component in List & Label 23.
Upon the release of version 23 of our List & Label reporting tool, the combit Report Server will become part of the List & Label Enterprise Edition. Hence, it is about time we reported on the new features of our enterprise reporting solution!
In LL21, we improved the Drag & Drop behavior thoroughly. However there was one thing still missing. When dropping e.g. a date field, at times you don't need the actual date in the report but rather e.g. the year. The same for numerical values – do you want decimals? If yes, how many? Do you require a local formatting? Or a currency symbol? While you can easily achieve any of these formattings using simple formulas or the "Format" property, you have to do just that. So drag and drop is not the no-brainer it is supposed to be in a perfect world. In LL23, the world will actually become a little more perfect.
Many things can often be implemented significantly easier and faster in managed code than in unmanaged code, such as with Delphi or C++. Sometimes, there already exist ready-made .NET modules which contain the desired requirements and which need to be used in your own unmanaged application. But the question then is: How can a .NET module be made accessible to an unmanaged system?
Continuing the journey of improving the performance, we decided to tweak a bit on the printing side as well. These optimizations help when using the same table several times with different fields. Think of a tabular report with some charts and a crosstab. Typically you have different views on your data in these objects. For these cases, the improvement is huge – I mean really huge.
Historically, List & Label has always been working without a database in the background. During the years, we've added powerful databinding to the components, however at the core, the principle stayed the same: your application (or the databinding layer) passes all available data before opening the Designer.
Today, I’d like to outline a few more minor new features of LL22 before they get lost in the upcoming blog posts on LL23. There are still plenty of nifty things in LL22 to discover that I haven’t blogged about yet.
Have you ever stumbled across TTFHW? This is an important nerd metric, meaning "time to first hello world". Basically it tells you how long it will take you as a developer to get to your first hello world success using a platform / API.
This is a major, bold new addition that will be available with List & Label 23. Currently the combit Report Server is available as a standalone out-of-the-box, self-service reporting solution. You can configure data sources, ad-hoc-design your reports, preview in your browser, export reports to a huge variety of formats or schedule email blasts. All of this in a responsive web application that works on any device. Starting with version 23, this server product will be included in the List & Label Enterprise Edition.
One of the nice parts of my job is getting around quite often. Through the years, I've held some hundred presentations. At developer conferences, user group meetings and our own roadshows (the next will happen this fall). I thought I'll share some hints and tools I've found valuable.
Today marks the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2017. We're also celebrating 15 years of .NET and 20 years of Visual Studio. It's been a long way! Actually, I had the honor to attend the VS Live in San Francisco when .NET was released.
Years ago I started developing a class to simplify the integration of List & Label into Xbase++ which I used for all my client's apps. The range of functionality grew with every new task. By now it supports real data preview which is handled in a separate thread.
The Clarion community has been working with List & Label for many years now. Starting with the Solace templates, those were donated to the public domain in 2010. Since then, various contributors have been working on them.
First of all, on behalf of the whole combit team I'd like to wish you a happy belated new year. I hope you enjoyed the holiday season and start into 2017 with refueled energy. While we're busily working on version 23 already, I'd like to continue sharing some hidden gems in List & Label 22.
GS1 defines a huge range of application identifiers that can be used to encode certain information in a barcode. Besides the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), which is usually the most important part, the production date, packaging component number, count of items and many more application identifiers (AIs) are defined.
In the brand-new version 22 of List & Label, we introduce a new process to send and receive debug output. This has great advantages when integrating List & Label in existing logging landscapes. Internally, the UDP protocol is now used for sending debug messages. Logging services and web applications has been a royal pain before - it has just become a breeze.
While List & Label has a superior concept for printing mail merges, many other (usually band-type) reporting tools people got used to apply a different concept to print invoices and other mail merge typed projects. Usually in List & Label, you'd define the header data as variables and use text objects, images etc. to design your letter head.
We have a release cycle of approximately one year per major version - actually it's quite accurately so, we have released the past 10 versions late in October. Coincidentially, this happens to be around my birthday, but that's a different story. It's always a nice present anyway.
From time to time it's great fun to stray off the beaten .NET path to venture into other developer's hemispheres. This time I paid a visit to the great crowd at the EMEA PUG Challenge in Noordwijk/Netherlands to dig into the Progress community.
For you as an enterprise application developer, logging is probably one of the essential features of your app. It enables you to trace and see what the user did just before the app went blank, and see if the typical user answer "I haven't done anything" proves right or wrong. To support you in this task, logging was built into List & Label from the very start.
Until version 22, there was a number of restrictions for web based projects. As the Web Designer is a single project file designer, all the glory that comes with multiple project files like project templates, table of contents and index and – most prominently – drilldown support were not available as they couldn't be designed.
Quite a while ago we introduced a full screen presentation mode which allows you a quick presentation of your reports. Why fire up PowerPoint (or any other presentation software) when you just need to present a couple of charts and tables? This way, your presentations are lightweight and always up to date, as you or your end-users can re-create them just in time.
This is one of those "whaaaaat, that didn't work before?" features. No, it didn't. Until version 22, you were only able to sort bar charts with string labels ascending or descending. Alphabetically. Numerics and dates are treated differently, but for strings you only could get A-Z, Z-A or unordered, i.e. in the order the database supplies the data.
With Treemap charts you can visualize hierarchical data by using nested rectangles in the upcoming version 22 of our List & Label reporting tool. The area of each rectangle is proportional to its value, while the sum of all rectangle areas fills up the whole chart area.
Version 22 of List & Label will introduce a new WPF wrapper control for the existing WinForms PreviewControl. While it uses a WindowsFormsHost at the core, the wrapper is a drag & drop replacement for the existing WPF preview control which will continue to be supported.
As we swiftly proceed through the development process of List & Label 22, we found a slot to add one more feature to the crosstab. Starting in version 19, we've added a lot of interactivity to the preview, including a feature called "Expandable Regions" for the report container. It allows to expand sub tables by just a click. For LL22, we've now extended this feature to the crosstab.
This is one of the major UI visible changes in LL22. All objects have their distinct set of properties which is displayed in the property window. Depending on the complexity and flexibility of the object, the list of properties is quite long where most of the time you probably don't need 50% of them. Enter the new Property Favorites.
The process of getting snail mail ready for posting can be rather tiresome. You print your letters or invoices, enjoying the fine work you have done designing them in List & Label, and then? Even in our modern times you lick the stamp, assuming you have the right one at hand, and stick it on the envelope. How very old-school is that? With the upcoming version 22 of List & Label this process can be elegantly automated through Internetmarke, a service to pay for postage online by German courier company Deutsche Post AG.
Service Pack 3.001 adds a host of new features to combit Report Server 3. Some improvements in our enterprise reporting solution were inspired by the productive feedback from our customers. Thanks for letting us know about your ideas! Here’s a short list of the latest features and improvements.
The IDataProvider interface for .NET has enabled many features that are not available for all of the other platforms so far. Most importantly, it brings multiple report containers and nested tables. For C++, we've included a sample in LL21. This is sadly missing in Delphi. In addition, the current Delphi data-binding engine still works against the BDE, a technology that has been deprecated quite a while ago by Embarcadero.
We'll introduce a brand new popular chart type that has been missing in List & Label until version 22: radar charts. Also known as "spider charts", "web charts" or "polar charts", they are a cool way to visualize ratios between different categories across multiple rows. It can answer questions like "which values are most similar, i.e. do we see clusters of values" and helps to find outliers at a glance.
From the latest blog post you could already tell that the crosstab is one of our focus areas for version 22. Besides multiple result cells we decided to pay a visit to the crosstab functions as well. In version 21 these functions can already be used to reference the values of sum cells, column and row labels etc. By extending the functions slightly, striking new features become available.
Despite its tender age, our self-service reporting solution combit Report Server has already garnered no small amount of attention, as evidenced by the Big Data Rising Star award it received from the Experton Group last year. We are currently working on the new version...
This is a goody. Try out for yourself and have fun!
As with every release, we've added a lot of finetuning to the Designer and its objects. We haven't been able to cover each of the new features in the past LL21 blogpost feature marathon – there are just too many gems to uncover. So here are some of these new Designer features you don't want to miss that make working with LL smoother than ever before.
In version 20, we started to blog about upcoming features in List & Label. I'd like to stick to this new tradition and share new features in version 21 to give you an idea of what we're working on. As always, comments are appreciated very much. If you have new ideas to share, you'll also want to visit our feedback portal. See our April blogpost if you haven't worked with the portal before. So, without any further ado I'll share the first new feature with you – an improved default font handling.
User innovation has always been a driving force for our product development. Many of the features we've added in the past were inspired by requests from the community. Often, multiple requests for similar features helped us to find the actual need behind the feature ideas. Most prominently, the report container was born this way – from the need to be able to report relational data structures.
While we are constantly working on LL21, we started to merge selected features to the 20-branch. This provides us with the agility to quickly react to frequent demands and offer a much shorter time to market for our subscription customers.
The data provider concept has been around for a couple of years now. We steadily work on extending the list of available data providers and can bind to most any data source by now. Besides the well-known ones, there are also some meta providers that deserve some spotlight.
As we're starting internal discussions and meetings and the first LL21 sprint is getting in shape I wanted to share this photograph, the result of a two hour meeting between the two guys that are sometimes called "Mr. List & Mr. Label" internally - our Senior Architect Christian Kaiser and myself.
We always try to implement new features as visible as possible. However, sometimes features are less discoverable or self explaining than we'd hope for – we're steadily working on that. Here are three very useful features you might have overlooked so far.
In version 20 you see the debut of a brand new Designer object: the checkbox. This object is used to indicate if a boolean value (a condition) is met or not. Think of visualizing the availability of a product, the selected menu in a hotel etc. And the OLE object just got a major overhaul.
List & Label 20 is quickly hitting the final milestones. I've been blogging about the new features since spring. This time, however, I'd like to share some insights into what happens as we shift near RTM.
In the last version we introduced a number of interactive features like report parameters, expandable regions, and dynamic sortings. Until version 20, using these in a web application was not possible as they result in a partial rerendering of the report or – for drilldown reports – trigger a brand new report. As the existing viewers didn't have a communication channel to a server control, this rerendering was impossible. Enter the new HTML5 viewer. This viewer is designed to work in almost any web browser. It is optimized for mobile devices and supports interactivity. It requires ASP.NET on the server side but can use any operating system on the client.
The improvement of our support for .NET has been a major focus in our feature planning process since the initial .NET beta release in early 2001. As more and more IDE vendors adopt CLR support for their languages and join the .NET community, .NET has become ever more important. Thus, version 20 will feature a wide range of new .NET features that make List & Label even more versatile when using it with CLR languages.
Through a cooperation with REA, a renown vendor of barcode verifiers, we were able to grade and improve our barcodes according to the usual ISO standards. Amongst other optimizations we completely changed the rendering algorithm to optionally match the bars exactly to the device pixels, eliminating all rounding effects this way. Typically, at least a grade of "B" is required by barcode consuments. This should now be easily achievable on typical hardware.
The Ribbon interface has been adapted to Redmond's latest UI style. It now supports the Office 2013 flat icon style and thus blends nicely with modern applications. For those who really need it, we still ship the "old" interface in a sepatate resource file that can be used instead of the default.
This has been a customer request that kept coming back over and over again – “please add the possibility to export to more formats from the preview window”. The typical workflow obviously is to check the result in the preview first. If all is well then an export to the final format is triggered. In List & Label 20 we now have added the possibility to export to the formats that were requested most – Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and XHTML. These formats were added to the already existing PDF, Text and Image formats.
From the perspective of an Office User, this was one of the major missing features in List & Label so far. In Microsoft Excel, for example, you often find yourself styling cells to resemble a headline. The workflow here is to just style one cell and then use the format painter tool for the other cells. This saves a remarkable amount of time. In List & Label, you could have used a multi selection of fields, however if you forgot (or – behold – didn't know) this feature, you'd find yourself repeating the same formatting steps again and again. And if you wanted to transfer the format of a whole object – e.g. a chart with all the fonts, colors, background settings etc. – there was no workaround to a huge lot of work. Enter the format painter tool...
Since we introduced the report container in List & Label 11, the one remaining feature request that kept coming in was “could we have multiple report containers, please”. Many cases can be covered by using a multi-columnar layout for the report container as a workaround or combining distances between container elements and changes in alignment to get the visual impression of separated tables. But these workarounds are not very discoverable and they are just that – workarounds. In version 20 we’ll introduce a brand new databinding mode for the .NET component which will replace the old one seamlessly. You won’t need to apply any code changes to profit from this new mode. However, under the hood things will be working quite different then.
The two tool windows you'll probably use the most in the report designer of our List & Label reporting tool are the "Objects" window and the "Report Structure" window. The "Objects" window enables you to quickly select an object in order to change its properties and contents. The "Report Structure" window is used to configure the specific contents of a report container object, i.e. tables and subtables, charts, crosstabs and Gantt charts.
Using report parameters has become very popular since we've introduced them in version 19. A typical use case that will become even more seminal with version 20 of our reporting tool is using parameters to filter data (see last feature focus). This is something we've usually put on the "don't" list as databases can filter data much faster than we can. In the past, all records had to be passed to the reporting engine which then decided if a record should be used or not. A vast overhead for a task databases are usually optimized for. In version 20, we'll be introducing a new feature that allows List & Label filter expressions to be translated to native database filters, therefore hugely increasing performance (in principle, depending on the data this is "infinitely" faster).
Building on the sound foundation of report parameters introduced in version 19 of our List & Label reporting tool, we've extended the way drilldown reports can be used in the report designer. In addition to the drilldown via relations which we already had in the product for a couple of versions, you can now trigger a sub report that uses report parameters and set the parameter values depending on the item that you just clicked in the preview. This terrific feature works for pie/donut and bar charts, shapefile charts, table fields and crosstab contents. Of course, a drilldown report can contain another drilldown, too. As with all the feature focus articles, keep in mind that this feature is not yet available in the current version, it will be part of List & Label 20.
In the past, we haven’t been communicating our development progress until the next major version of our development component was almost finished and polished. This is now going to change! Our motivation for this blog is, to show you early what to expect from the next version of our List & Label reporting tool.