AI at combit – a look behind the curtain

Since the release of ChatGPT, the world of artificial intelligence (AI) has changed rapidly. You’ve probably already had experience with tools like ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot that take developer workflows to a new level. At combit, we’re also open to the possibilities that AI offers, and are continuously integrating them into our own processes.

Embedding Fonts in Project Files

Applications are increasingly deployed in Docker environments or directly on the web server. With doing so, it’s often challenging to provide fonts. In particular, installing fonts in Docker containers can be a tedious task, as previously documented here in our forum. Fonts often can’t be easily distributed or installed on web servers either. This creates a situation, particularly with company-owned fonts, in which not all required fonts are available by default.

InMemoryDataProviderWrapper: Data Provider on Steroids

The features of different data providers vary widely. Depending on the data source, sorting, native aggregate functions or filters at database level may be available directly. Or not. For example, none of this is available in file-based formats such as JSON or XML, or even in “web” formats such as REST. These are typically read “front to back” and therefore cannot offer sorting or native aggregation. With List & Label 29, we have something new to offer.

Enhanced Drag & Drop Support in the Designer

A frequently asked question was: “Why can’t I see the relations in the report designer?” This question refers to the variable/field window, in which 1:1 relationships were displayed, but not (the usually much more important) 1:n relationships. In short, our answer was always: “The relations are there, but only in the object window, e.g. when creating tables”. We even put the long answer in a Knowledgebase article.

Adding Page Breaks at Arbitrary Positions

List & Label already has a wide range of functionality to control the page flow as needed. Each object has a “Pagebreak Before” property, just like the elements in a report container. Tables have an additional page break condition that is evaluated for each line. However, one feature was missing: forcing a page break within a text. This was changed in version 28.