This is our last blog post about what’s new in List & Label 29, so let’s take a look at features we haven’t presented yet. Highlights include native .NET 8 assemblies, new data providers, and enhanced report design options.
The features of different data providers vary widely. Depending on the data source, sorting, native aggregate functions or filters at database level may be available directly. Or not. For example, none of this is available in file-based formats such as JSON or XML, or even in “web” formats such as REST. These are typically read “front to back” and therefore cannot offer sorting or native aggregation. With List & Label 29, we have something new to offer.
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.
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.
Often reports consist of similar, repetitive sections like a number of charts or crosstabs just filtered for different categories but otherwise identical. Or tables and subtables that have a preselected set of columns you want to have wherever this table is used. List & Label 26 now helps you and your users to get rid of the tedious task to maintain such reports and apply changes to all instances of objects. You can add real subreports that contain exactly the required items and maintain those in one single place.
After improving the crosstab's Drag & Drop capabilities in version 24, it was time to overhaul the table's D&D support as well. The last major change here dates back to 2015 – so without any further ado here's what will be added in version 26.
Continuing our quest to make the table object more versatile and powerful in LL25, we added an important tweak to the way table lines are kept together. Before, you just had the choice between keeping all lines together or none. That means, if the output for a single record stretched over a couple of pages and consisted of several line definitions, there was hardly ever a way to get the wrapping "right".
Another step forward in our continuing quest to improve what's already great – our table object. Until LL25, you had to decide which widths you'd like to reserve for your respective columns. While this works out just nice most of the time, sometimes the result is less than perfect.
While I've been blogging about the major and most-UI-visible features during the last few months, of course there are gazillions of minor and less visible changes underneath the hood in LL24. This blog post sums up some more reasons to be cheerful.
A crosstab does a great job in aggregating your data and helps to spot trends and outliers. We've put great effort in enhancing our crosstab support for the last few versions. However, although there's a nice wizard to get you started, usability testing showed that even creating simple crosstabs was still a challenging task for some users. That's something we hope to change with LL24.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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