List & Label Reporting Blog

As with every new version, we have updated List & Label in a lot of different places to make it smoother to use, more modern and accessible. So to continue with this tradition, here are some treats in List & Label 25 you might have overlooked so far.

As we all are affected by the infamous COVID-19 outbreak I assume many of you are working from their home offices just as we do. We had the luck (aka foresight) to prepare this early on so we were up and running in less than a day. Nevertheless, once we started, there were a couple of challenges we were facing. I thought I'd share some nuggets here that might be useful to you.

In May 2019, Microsoft announced that it will no longer develop the existing .NET Framework. So the current version 4.8 will be the last release. From now on, the company will concentrate on the further development of .NET Core. For developers, the question arises: Is the release of .NET Core 3.1 a good time to migrate from the .NET Framework? The good news is that you don't have to do without List & Label when migrating. 

Creating preview files is all well and good. However, when you needed to access the texts within the preview for post processing, you had to resort to a text export, finding the relevant strings and copying them from there. In LL25, we added a powerful way to extract texts from a preview, directly from within the preview window.

GraphQL was publicly released in 2015 and became quite popular since then. It's used by a number of big web applications like Instagram, Facebook and others.

While for standard tasks the default mechanism for Rscript rendering of List & Label might be sufficient and convenient to automatically generate the png, jpeg or svg chart output from a Rscript on the fly, there might be situations where you simply desire more control.

List & Label has supported a number of text based export formats for quite a while. You can have XML, CSV and layout TXT export in different variants. That way, you can use List & Label as a convenient way to convert your data from one of the supported data sources to something you can use in other applications again. But one very popular format was missing so far that's been around for quite a while: Java Script Object Notation aka JSON.

As promised in our first blogpost about the innovations of Report Server 25, here comes the second part, including some very interesting features like Webhooks, connection string management or import/export of settings.

Version 1.0 of the electronic invoice data format ZUGFeRD for the exchange of invoices has already been supported. For List & Label 25, the specification of version 2.0, officially released in March 2019, is now also supported.

.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.