Making-of: Web Report Designer in Development Part I

The rapidly increasing number of web apps has led to a great demand for web-based reporting solutions. We followed this trend with List & Label, and moved the Designer to the web – from version 27 on. One huge benefit, brought by the new Designer: way less effort, because only one front- and back-end needs to be developed and subsequently maintained. Naturally, the development of the new Web Report Designer presented us with technical challenges which we’d like to share with you – maybe knowing about our own learning curve is going to help you with your own projects, too.

How to Automatically Export Reports to Cloud Storage Services

With List & Label you can export reports in different formats like PDF, Word, Excel and many more. The resulting reports can either be stored directly in the file system or – in .NET – in a stream, in order to transfer them manually into a database, a document management system or similar. Reports can also be automatically stored directly in so-called cloud storage services. The cloud storage providers for GoogleDrive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox are available in List & Label for .NET for this purpose.

Breakthrough for Web/Distributed Applications

Repo Source Selection

Until version 22, there was a number of restrictions for web based projects. As the Web Designer is a single project file designer, all the glory that comes with multiple project files like project templates, table of contents and index and – most prominently – drilldown support were not available as they couldn't be designed.