List & Label Reporting Blog

Crosstabs are a very popular object within the List & Label Designer, that’s why we’re continuously adding enhancements to this important features. So far though, despite all added extensions, crosstabs have ultimately been a simple grouping in two dimensions. From version 29 on, they’ll become more dimensional.

The latest version 29 of our Report Server comes with a host of new features and improvements, increasing efficiency and flexibility when managing data sources and creating reports. Below is an overview of the most important updates.

The 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.

List & Label’s most recent version 29 is coming along with quite a fe exciting news for the Web Report Designer and the Web Report Viewer. These updates provide improved functionalities and enhanced usability to developers and end users alike.

The latest service pack 28.004 for List & Label and the Report Server brings a new chart type in the Web Report Designer and Windows 11 23H2 support. Experience improved user interfaces alongside significant performance upgrades especially for horizontal gauges. For a detailed list of all changes, see the ServicePack.pdf in your installation or in the service pack download section.

A 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.

As with any release, there are way too many new features in version 28 to cover them all in separate blog posts. So here’s a quick summary of some rather hidden gems that still deserve some attention.

List & Label already has a wide range of functionality to control the page flow as needed. Each object has a “Pagebreak Before” property, just like the elements in a report container. Tables have an additional page break condition that is evaluated for each line. However, one feature was missing: forcing a page break within a text. This was changed in version 28.

Further improving our export formats is one of the focus areas for List & Label 28. Introducing fixed headers for the XHTML export fits nicely into this strategy. This feature, also known as frozen headers, has been requested by some of your peers.

Report parameters have gained great popularity since their introduction. They offer a flexible and easy way to create dynamic reports. In particular, the ability to create data-bound parameters has been well received. However, in combination with larger databases, there were some limitations that we finally eliminated now in version 28.