List & Label Reporting Blog

Microsoft’s Cosmos DB is a cloud based, scalable database service that has become quite popular since its initial launch in May 2017. I thought it might be a nice idea to check it out and – while I’m at it – see how I can connect my favorite reporting tool to it.
 

This is the first of two blog posts presenting the new features of our combit Report Server in the upcoming version 24. Since the last version, in which the Report Server has become part of our List & Label developer component, the development teams of both products have been working even more closely together. This enables us to better coordinate the needs of both products, and thus also of our customers.

As you may have guessed, by now we are well into working on version 24 of our List & Label reporting tool, which is due to be released this fall. Today I proudly present the first feature preview!

Let's be honest, developing has it's challenges. To meet the ever more diverse demands on applications and technologies, we all rely on a multitude of ressources to make our lives easier. So we, the makers of your favorite reporting tool, thought it's about time to let you benefit from our experience. Below you will find just a small selection of the tools that we can't do without.

As you might know, this year’s Winter Sports Event will start just by the end of the week. I have to circumlocate the actual name of the event as those people really mean “Trademark” when they say it. Let’s call it simply “Games” for the rest of this article, which hopefully should be safe. Anyway, I thought this would be a good opportunity to do some statistics with my favorite reporting tool.

The compilation of the redistributable files of List & Label has been somewhat cumbersome so far. But we listened to the wishes of our customers and developed an easy-to-use redistribution assistant.

While holiday season is approching fast, bringing some well-deserved quality time off work for all of us, I briefly wanted to share some miscellaneous treats in version 23 of our List & Label reporting tool with you.

The Scalable Vector Graphics format has been around for quite a while. The first specification was released in 2001, and meanwhile all browsers offer solid support for SVG. During the years, we've received a couple of requests to support SVG in List & Label. Initially, I was hoping for Microsoft to make SVG rendering support a Windows feature that we could just use. However, that hasn't happened so far. And so we had to come up with a different solution.

The signal ranges are a handy gauge feature to highlight parts of the scale. It enables you to divide the scale e.g. into a green, yellow and red part. That way, you can judge at a glance if a value is "good" or "bad". In LL23, this feature has been extended to charts.