Web Reporting

In the last part of our blog post series, we’ll take a closer look at challenges that came up while developing the Web Report Designer – especially in regards to back-end requests, hotkeys and the formula editor.

In our last blog post, we already announced it: this time, we’d like to address further challenges we encountered during our development of the Web Report Designer. Take advantage from what we learned, and maybe even use some bits for your own projects.

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.

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.