List & Label Reporting Blog
Enhanced Drag & Drop Support in the Designer
ByA frequently asked question was: “Why can’t I see the relations in the report designer?” This question refers to the variable/field window, in which 1:1 relationships were displayed, but not (the usually much more important) 1:n relationships. In short, our answer was always: “The relations are there, but only in the object window, e.g. when creating tables”. We even put the long answer in a Knowledgebase article.
New Web Designer
Until version 21, we used browser specific plug-ins or ActiveX controls in order to display the Designer right in the browser. However, browser vendors are more and more restrictive and begin to ban plugins from their browsers altogether. Thus, it was time for a new technology.
Enhanced Drag & Drop Experience
For years, our drag & drop support consisted of "well, you can drag one field into an existing table". If you needed multiple fields – repeat. Creating a table via Drag & Drop? No way. Creating a sub table? Don't even think of it. All this will change thoroughly with LL21.
End User Friendly Conditional Formatting
This is one of the major new features of LL21. Conditional Formatting is needed whenever you want to change properties depending on data, e.g. something like "red font if value is negative" or "highlight the background if value is greater than threshold". This allows to read a report at a glance and quickly get an overview of what areas of your data require a second look.
Lightning Fast Aggregations for .NET
Aggregation within reports is a hot topic. While it is very convenient to just aggregate what you see it can become very expensive if huge amounts of data are involved. Think of sales statistics for your products – you don't really want to iterate through all order details in order to just get the total sales for your article. This is a task databases are optimized for.
Support for Nested Tables
One of the few requests that kept coming in was "Can we have the detail data in a column of the master table". While there are a couple of workarounds in version 20 that do similar things, the actual request could not be fulfilled this way. Plus, the workarounds were not as discoverable as we would have loved them to be as they included negative indents for line definitions and educated guesses on the number of detail records that are likely to be printed.This is going to change in version 21 – List & Label is going to support a new field type "table" which enables you to nest tables.
Enhanced Color Picker
The existing color picker e.g. for the background color property of a field contained a very long list of predefined color values and – at the very bottom – a "Formula…" entry, which was neither very discoverable nor usable. And choosing "Formula…" left it completely to your end users to figure our how to use the RGB, HSL, RainbowColor, HeatmapColor or one of the other color functions. In LL21, we'll introduce a completely new color picker UI.
Major Updates to Included Projects and the Objects Window
Including other projects is a very nice way to reuse objects and ensure a stringent corporate design. I've blogged about this possibility just recently. However, if you heavily use this feature, your object list can quickly become cluttered with lots of objects from includes. You cannot select them, you cannot change their properties – the only useful thing is their context menu which brings you quickly to the included project. This led to a request in our feedback portal to be able to hide these included objects. And yes, List & Label 21 will enable you to do just that.
Improved Handling of Default Fonts
In version 20, we started to blog about upcoming features in List & Label. I'd like to stick to this new tradition and share new features in version 21 to give you an idea of what we're working on. As always, comments are appreciated very much. If you have new ideas to share, you'll also want to visit our feedback portal. See our April blogpost if you haven't worked with the portal before. So, without any further ado I'll share the first new feature with you – an improved default font handling.
Designer Preview Support for Xbase++
Today, I spoke at the Xbase Forum Meeting in Potsdam, Germany. Besides presenting what our reporting tool can do I had the joy and honor to share my presentation with Tom Liehr, a respected member of the Xbase++ community. Together we've created a modified sample for Xbase++ that shows how to support the designer preview in Xbase++. Or – better said – Tom did most of the hard work while I stood flabbergasted at the sideline. I was only able to give some hints that helped crossing the finish line just in time which was Easter Monday, 10:30 pm.
Vote Now – We Love User Innovation
User innovation has always been a driving force for our product development. Many of the features we've added in the past were inspired by requests from the community. Often, multiple requests for similar features helped us to find the actual need behind the feature ideas. Most prominently, the report container was born this way – from the need to be able to report relational data structures.
