List & Label Reporting Blog
New Service Pack 29.001 for List & Label and the Report Server
ByThe new Service Pack 29.001 brings several new features and improvements. The .NET Sample Center user interface has been completely redesigned to provide additional information and links to the samples. Also new are special “signed” NuGet packages that contain signed List & Label assemblies. The OdbcDataProvider now supports a custom ParameterMarkerFormat to override or correct the format provided by the driver.
News from the Report Server Dev Department
ByDespite its tender age, our self-service reporting solution combit Report Server has already garnered no small amount of attention, as evidenced by the Big Data Rising Star award it received from the Experton Group last year. We are currently working on the new version…
What Our ALM Toolchain Looks Like
ByI'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 :-).
REST API for combit Report Server
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:
Introducing C++ Support for Multiple Report Containers
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.
The Challenging Road to Release
We're quickly approaching the final release of List & Label 21. As you surely know from your own practice, release times are hard times ;-). You are moving constantly between madness and excitement. To visualize the long and challenging road we're about to finish, we created the following infographic.
Further Finetuning in the Designer
As with every release, we've added a lot of finetuning to the Designer and its objects. We haven't been able to cover each of the new features in the past LL21 blogpost feature marathon – there are just too many gems to uncover. So here are some of these new Designer features you don't want to miss that make working with LL smoother than ever before.
Enhanced PDF Export
The PDF export in List & Label 21 supports Type3 fonts as embedding option. Unicode and symbol characters are stored as Glyphs in this embedding mode. This way, these fonts are supported optimally – you no longer need to download font packages for your favorite PDF viewer.
Scripting Support in Functions
List & Label has a very powerful formula language. Most manipulations one could think of are possible out of the box or can be realized by using a user defined designer function. However, the latter requires you as a developer to think of the need before deploying your application. In LL21, we'll introduce a new feature that allows to use C# or scripting host languages like VBScript directly in the function wizard.
AutoRecover for the Designer
In List & Label 21 the Designer optionally saves the current project to a backup location. If the Designer is not closed properly (i.e. system crash, unexpected shutdown or even power outage) you can easily restore the last state and don't lose hours but rather minutes of work.
New and Overhauled Data Providers
The ObjectDataProvider is one of the key providers we ship with LL. It binds to generic lists just as well as to EntityFramework or other Object Relational Mapper data. It is also the final fallback for all datasources that cannot be handled by one of the other providers. In LL21, the provider got a couple of new features for the .NET 4.0 assembly.
