List & Label Reporting Blog

For years, our drag & drop support consisted of "well, you can drag one field into an existing table". If you needed multiple fields – repeat. Creating a table via Drag & Drop? No way. Creating a sub table? Don't even think of it. All this will change thoroughly with LL21.

This is one of the major new features of LL21. Conditional Formatting is needed whenever you want to change properties depending on data, e.g. something like "red font if value is negative" or "highlight the background if value is greater than threshold". This allows to read a report at a glance and quickly get an overview of what areas of your data require a second look.

Aggregation within reports is a hot topic. While it is very convenient to just aggregate what you see it can become very expensive if huge amounts of data are involved. Think of sales statistics for your products – you don't really want to iterate through all order details in order to just get the total sales for your article. This is a task databases are optimized for.

One of the few requests that kept coming in was "Can we have the detail data in a column of the master table". While there are a couple of workarounds in version 20 that do similar things, the actual request could not be fulfilled this way. Plus, the workarounds were not as discoverable as we would have loved them to be as they included negative indents for line definitions and educated guesses on the number of detail records that are likely to be printed.This is going to change in version 21 – List & Label is going to support a new field type "table" which enables you to nest tables.

The existing color picker e.g. for the background color property of a field contained a very long list of predefined color values and – at the very bottom – a "Formula…" entry, which was neither very discoverable nor usable. And choosing "Formula…" left it completely to your end users to figure our how to use the RGB, HSL, RainbowColor, HeatmapColor or one of the other color functions. In LL21, we'll introduce a completely new color picker UI.

Including other projects is a very nice way to reuse objects and ensure a stringent corporate design. I've blogged about this possibility just recently. However, if you heavily use this feature, your object list can quickly become cluttered with lots of objects from includes. You cannot select them, you cannot change their properties – the only useful thing is their context menu which brings you quickly to the included project. This led to a request in our feedback portal to be able to hide these included objects. And yes, List & Label 21 will enable you to do just that.

Today, I spoke at the Xbase Forum Meeting in Potsdam, Germany. Besides presenting what our reporting tool can do I had the joy and honor to share my presentation with Tom Liehr, a respected member of the Xbase++ community. Together we've created a modified sample for Xbase++ that shows how to support the designer preview in Xbase++. Or – better said – Tom did most of the hard work while I stood flabbergasted at the sideline. I was only able to give some hints that helped crossing the finish line just in time which was Easter Monday, 10:30 pm.

The idea for this post was triggered by a comment by MikeH on the last blog post. He requested the feature to have a kind of meta object containing different other objects in a pre-specified manner in order to speed things up for endusers. There are already a couple of features that cover at least similar use cases and I thought I'd highlight them.