List & Label Reporting Blog
Embedding Fonts in Project Files
ByApplications are increasingly deployed in Docker environments or directly on the web server. With doing so, it’s often challenging to provide fonts. In particular, installing fonts in Docker containers can be a tedious task, as previously documented here in our forum. Fonts often can’t be easily distributed or installed on web servers either. This creates a situation, particularly with company-owned fonts, in which not all required fonts are available by default.
Major Updates to Included Projects and the Objects Window
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.
Improved Handling of Default Fonts
In version 20, we started to blog about upcoming features in List & Label. I’d like to stick to this new tradition and share new features in version 21 to give you an idea of what we’re working on. As always, comments are appreciated very much. If you have new ideas to share, you’ll also want to visit our feedback portal. See our April blogpost if you haven’t worked with the portal before. So, without any further ado I’ll share the first new feature with you – an improved default font handling.
Designer Preview Support for Xbase++
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.
Vote Now – We Love User Innovation
User innovation has always been a driving force for our product development. Many of the features we've added in the past were inspired by requests from the community. Often, multiple requests for similar features helped us to find the actual need behind the feature ideas. Most prominently, the report container was born this way – from the need to be able to report relational data structures.
Two Ways to Reuse Existing Objects In New Projects
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.
New Features in Release 20.002
While we are constantly working on LL21, we started to merge selected features to the 20-branch. This provides us with the agility to quickly react to frequent demands and offer a much shorter time to market for our subscription customers.
Accessing any .NET Data Source with the Data Providers
The data provider concept has been around for a couple of years now. We steadily work on extending the list of available data providers and can bind to most any data source by now. Besides the well-known ones, there are also some meta providers that deserve some spotlight.
A First Peek at List & Label 21
As we're starting internal discussions and meetings and the first LL21 sprint is getting in shape I wanted to share this photograph, the result of a two hour meeting between the two guys that are sometimes called "Mr. List & Mr. Label" internally – our Senior Architect Christian Kaiser and myself.
Three Often Overlooked Features
We always try to implement new features as visible as possible. However, sometimes features are less discoverable or self explaining than we'd hope for – we're steadily working on that. Here are three very useful features you might have overlooked so far.
New and Extended Designer Objects
In version 20 you see the debut of a brand new Designer object: the checkbox. This object is used to indicate if a boolean value (a condition) is met or not. Think of visualizing the availability of a product, the selected menu in a hotel etc. And the OLE object just got a major overhaul.
