Jochen Bartlau 
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.
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.
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.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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