List & Label Reporting Blog

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.

While we are constantly working on LL21, we started to merge selected features to the 20-branch. This provides us with the agility to quickly react to frequent demands and offer a much shorter time to market for our subscription customers.

The data provider concept has been around for a couple of years now. We steadily work on extending the list of available data providers and can bind to most any data source by now. Besides the well-known ones, there are also some meta providers that deserve some spotlight.

As we're starting internal discussions and meetings and the first LL21 sprint is getting in shape I wanted to share this photograph, the result of a two hour meeting between the two guys that are sometimes called "Mr. List & Mr. Label" internally – our Senior Architect Christian Kaiser and myself.

We always try to implement new features as visible as possible. However, sometimes features are less discoverable or self explaining than we'd hope for – we're steadily working on that. Here are three very useful features you might have overlooked so far.

In version 20 you see the debut of a brand new Designer object: the checkbox. This object is used to indicate if a boolean value (a condition) is met or not. Think of visualizing the availability of a product, the selected menu in a hotel etc. And the OLE object just got a major overhaul.

List & Label 20 is quickly hitting the final milestones. I've been blogging about the new features since spring. This time, however, I'd like to share some insights into what happens as we shift near RTM.

In the last version we introduced a number of interactive features like report parameters, expandable regions, and dynamic sortings. Until version 20, using these in a web application was not possible as they result in a partial rerendering of the report or – for drilldown reports – trigger a brand new report. As the existing viewers didn't have a communication channel to a server control, this rerendering was impossible. 
Enter the new HTML5 viewer. This viewer is designed to work in almost any web browser. It is optimized for mobile devices and supports interactivity. It requires ASP.NET on the server side but can use any operating system on the client.