List & Label Reporting Blog

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.

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.