List & Label Reporting Blog

With combit Report Server 3, you now also have the ad-hoc Designer in addition to the design features from previous versions. Ad-hoc Design wizards enable you to create lists and diagrams (charts) quickly and easily. This combination equips the reliable and powerful Report Server with a quick and streamlined interface that is perfect for generating simple reports. The interface of the new wizards has also been optimized for devices that support touch-screen technology, which allows it to be easily operated on tablet devices as well.

To continue the quest for the perfect crosstab, welcome to part three of this blog post series. After visiting multiple result cells and cross-column references, today let's look at another cool new feature in the LL22 crosstab – Auto-Fill. This comes in handy whenever there is few data. Think of a yearly statistic where you don't have results for each quarter. Printing something like Q1…Q2…Q4 looks awkward and unprofessional. In LL22 we have the solution to this.

As this was one of the most frequent requested features in our feedback portal and we hadn't visited the crosstab's features for a couple of versions, this feature was an easy pick. A crosstab is aggregating values and groups them by two or even more dimensions. Until version 22, there was exactly one aggregation possible, e.g. you could have either the number of orders or the revenue sum per customer and year, not both. In LL22, there is no limit anymore.

This time we feature a guest post from our partner and developer colleague Thomas Wurl. About two years ago, Thomas developed a free data provider for Progress OpenEdge available for all List & Label customers. While this provider was adopted successfully by many Progress users, it suffered some restrictions. So Thomas decided to restart from scratch and came up with an incredibly fast and powerful new solution. Here's his story. 

List & Label makes extensive use of the windows tree view control. Since version 21, we even support multi selection and Drag & Drop from the Variables/Fields Window. While the tree control works very nicely for a reasonable number of items, things change considerably once we're talking of hundreds of thousands of entries.

I'd like to take the time after the release of LL21 to give you a short tour of what our ALM tool chain looks like. You probably have the same needs and challenges in your everyday jobs that we have. It was a process of trial and error until we arrived at our current configuration. While we are happy with it for the time being, it's always good to keep an eye on new stuff – so this is the current state of development as of 01/2016 :-).

In our very first blogpost we announced to share updates about the ongoing development of all our products. Until now we put an emphasis on the development of our reporting tool List & Label. But now the time has come to open that focus and give insights on other product news right out of our dev department. That’s why we proudly present our first blogpost on our BI solution combit Report Server:

During our Roadshow this fall, the question I was asked the most was "why do you support certain features only for .NET". Most notably, multiple report containers (since LL20) and nested tables (since LL21) were only available for .NET databinding. The reason for this is the necessity to support a special and – until now – undocumented COM interface for passing the data to List & Label. We decided to leave this interface undocumented in version 20 in order to be free to apply changes without breaking customer code. We had to make sure the interface was ripe. Now we are and here we go.