List & Label Reporting Blog
We’re evolving: List & Label Cross Platform
ByMaybe you’ve already seen it on our social networks, our website, or in our livestream: at combit, we’re currently working on a new, forward-looking offshoot of List & Label—a cross-platform reporting solution that will primarily run on Linux. Internally, we call this project List & Label Cross Platform (LL-CP). It is aimed primarily at developers looking for a stable, high-performance, and modern reporting solution.
Reset Page Count for Group Header
While List & Label has a superior concept for printing mail merges, many other (usually band-type) reporting tools people got used to apply a different concept to print invoices and other mail merge typed projects. Usually in List & Label, you'd define the header data as variables and use text objects, images etc. to design your letter head.
Introducing Long Term Support (Enterprise Edition)
We have a release cycle of approximately one year per major version – actually it's quite accurately so, we have released the past 10 versions late in October. Coincidentially, this happens to be around my birthday, but that's a different story. It's always a nice present anyway.
Mingling with the Progress Community @ EMEA PUG Challenge
From time to time it's great fun to stray off the beaten .NET path to venture into other developer's hemispheres. This time I paid a visit to the great crowd at the EMEA PUG Challenge in Noordwijk/Netherlands to dig into the Progress community.
Introducing Enterprise Level Logging Support
For you as an enterprise application developer, logging is probably one of the essential features of your app. It enables you to trace and see what the user did just before the app went blank, and see if the typical user answer "I haven't done anything" proves right or wrong. To support you in this task, logging was built into List & Label from the very start.
Breakthrough for Web/Distributed Applications
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.
Animations for the Preview
Quite a while ago we introduced a full screen presentation mode which allows you a quick presentation of your reports. Why fire up PowerPoint (or any other presentation software) when you just need to present a couple of charts and tables? This way, your presentations are lightweight and always up to date, as you or your end-users can re-create them just in time.
Sorting Charts by Value
This is one of those "whaaaaat, that didn't work before?" features. No, it didn't. Until version 22, you were only able to sort bar charts with string labels ascending or descending. Alphabetically. Numerics and dates are treated differently, but for strings you only could get A-Z, Z-A or unordered, i.e. in the order the database supplies the data.
The Treemap Chart Experience
With Treemap charts you can visualize hierarchical data by using nested rectangles in the upcoming version 22 of our List & Label reporting tool. The area of each rectangle is proportional to its value, while the sum of all rectangle areas fills up the whole chart area.
WPF Wrapper for PreviewControl
Version 22 of List & Label will introduce a new WPF wrapper control for the existing WinForms PreviewControl. While it uses a WindowsFormsHost at the core, the wrapper is a drag & drop replacement for the existing WPF preview control which will continue to be supported.
Crosstabs: Expand Sub Tables in the Interactive Preview
As we swiftly proceed through the development process of List & Label 22, we found a slot to add one more feature to the crosstab. Starting in version 19, we've added a lot of interactivity to the preview, including a feature called "Expandable Regions" for the report container. It allows to expand sub tables by just a click. For LL22, we've now extended this feature to the crosstab.
