Miscellaneous Treats in List & Label 28
As with any release, there are way too many new features in version 28 to cover them all in separate blog posts. So here’s a quick summary of some rather hidden gems that still deserve some attention.
As with any release, there are way too many new features in version 28 to cover them all in separate blog posts. So here’s a quick summary of some rather hidden gems that still deserve some attention.
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.
Further improving our export formats is one of the focus areas for List & Label 28. Introducing fixed headers for the XHTML export fits nicely into this strategy. This feature, also known as frozen headers, has been requested by some of your peers.
Report parameters have gained great popularity since their introduction. They offer a flexible and easy way to create dynamic reports. In particular, the ability to create data-bound parameters has been well received. However, in combination with larger databases, there were some limitations that we finally eliminated now in version 28.
Microsoft is putting more and more obstacles in its Office 365 package, making it difficult to send SMTP emails “just like that” with basic authentication (see e.g. here) and with MAPI/XMAPI in the cloud anyway. But on-premise also brings new challenges (have you ever dealt with our Cross-Bitness-Proxy for x86 applications and x64 Office? 🙂 ). So it was about time to offer a new, up-to-date solution for the very frequently used email delivery.
Customer satisfaction is a crucial factor in List & Label’s success. That’s why we invited you back in January to participate in our List & Label survey. We value your feedback on both the product itself and our services. And, of course, we were anxious to receive your input regarding improvements and what you would like to see in the future.
List & Label 28 provides some new features and improvements for .NET developers. Most important, we’re now supporting the just released .NET 7. Performancewise, the optimized use of byte arrays for images makes a noticeable difference. And there’s also news regarding the support of new data sources. Here’s a list of the new features.
This blog post was prompted by a discussion in our forum. One of our customers, who’s been using List & Label since 1995 (which actually goes back longer than my own experience!) sent us a message, telling us that due to fear of errors, he usually waits for up to a year after the release, before finally implementing a new version. Right here, I’d like to explain why I don’t think that’s a good idea, and give you a bit of an insight into our quality assurance. We want you to feel good about using List & Label in your applications on a daily basis.
To further improve our export formats, was one of the main areas we focused on with List & Label 28. Specifically, we added a number of powerful new features to the Excel export. Without any further ado, here’s what’s new.
As we keep getting requests to support calling List & Label from an Azure Function, and – due to several restrictions like e.g. GDI sandboxing – List & Label can’t be used directly in this context, I thought it might be interesting to explore another way to the cloud, this time using the Report Server. Using its REST-API, you can even create reports from an Azure Function. But let’s walk through the process step by step.