New Service Pack 25.002 for List & Label and the Report Server
The Service Pack 25.002 has some new features and various improvements for you. We give you an overview of what's new and what has improved.
Ad-hoc-Designer
Full Support for .NET Core 3.0
.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.
Keeping Groups of Table Lines Together
Continuing our quest to make the table object more versatile and powerful in LL25, we added an important tweak to the way table lines are kept together. Before, you just had the choice between keeping all lines together or none. That means, if the output for a single record stretched over a couple of pages and consisted of several line definitions, there was hardly ever a way to get the wrapping "right".
Customizing the Preview’s Look & Feel
Since the introduction of our feature portal three years ago, it has become an important driver for our innovation. If you filter for "available in latest version", you'll find some fourty features we've built into the product on your request. So here comes a big "thank you" to everyone participating! Your help, effort and ideas are more than welcome anytime. Of course, we've implemented some of the top voted demands into LL24. One of them has been to enable the customization of the preview window's look and feel.
Add Your Custom Objects and Functions to the Web Designer
Extensibility is a first class citizen in the List & Label universe. You can add your own functions and objects to the Designer, enabling complex calculations within your code or custom objects. However, there was one important link missing so far – all this code just runs on the desktop. If your application runs on a server and you're using the Web Designer you're hosed – until version 24.
Vastly Improved Chart Rendering in the Browser
Over the years, we kept improving our chart engine with each version. We've added Donut, Radar and Treemap charts and offered new layout options. However, if your charts were to be rendered in the browser, the only available formats so far have been PNG or JPEG, leaving you with exactly two options: either have great quality and huge file sizes or a swift download and poor rendering quality. There was no option to combine both (and I'm not thinking "huge download and poor quality" here <g>). In LL24, this is going to change.
Converting Crosstabs to Charts and Vice Versa With List & Label
Crosstabs and charts have a lot in common. Often I find myself designing a crosstab for e.g. the sales per country. This works fine to get the absolute or even relative numbers. However, to get a visual impression of the fractions for a dashboard, I add a chart 99% of the time that shows just the same data as the crosstab.
How to “Find” Things in the Designer
One of the most wanted features from our feature portal will finally be available in List & Label 24: a powerful find feature for the Designer.
Signal Ranges Extended to Charts
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.
Virtual Formula Variables for Drag & Drop
In LL21, we improved the Drag & Drop behavior thoroughly. However there was one thing still missing. When dropping e.g. a date field, at times you don't need the actual date in the report but rather e.g. the year. The same for numerical values – do you want decimals? If yes, how many? Do you require a local formatting? Or a currency symbol? While you can easily achieve any of these formattings using simple formulas or the "Format" property, you have to do just that. So drag and drop is not the no-brainer it is supposed to be in a perfect world. In LL23, the world will actually become a little more perfect.
