Jochen Bartlau 
Back in March, we conducted our annual customer survey to gain deeper insight into the satisfaction and needs of our developer community. The results were extremely pleasing and revealing towards our aim to continuously develop List & Label and our services. Of course, we’d like to share them with you.
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.
Pivot/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, pivot/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.
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.
Microsoft is putting more and more obstacles in its Office 365 package, making it difficult to send SMTP emails “just like that” with basic authentication (see e.g. here) and with MAPI/XMAPI in the cloud anyway. But on-premise also brings new challenges (have you ever dealt with our Cross-Bitness-Proxy for x86 applications and x64 Office? 🙂 ). So it was about time to offer a new, up-to-date solution for the very frequently used email delivery.
Customer satisfaction is a crucial factor in List & Label’s success. That’s why we invited you back in January to participate in our List & Label survey. We value your feedback on both the product itself and our services. And, of course, we were anxious to receive your input regarding improvements and what you would like to see in the future.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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