New GraphQL Data Provider for List & Label
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.
API
Adding JSON to the Available Export Formats
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.
New SQL Routines in Data Sources and more | Report Server 25
The combit Report Server celebrates its 5th birthday. Right on time for the anniversary, the product again has some new features to offer. We focused especially on the wishes of our customers.
Adding Signature Support to the Email Module
This has been another great suggestion from our community at Idea Place. While the mail module is quite flexible and can send mails via SMTP, MAPI and XMAPI, and can either use the client's mail dialog or a custom, built in dialog, there was no way to append Outlook standard signatures to the sent mails so far. Microsoft has finally declined the request to add this feature to Outlook's MAPI implementation. So there was room for improvement.
New Connection to Microsoft Flow for the Report Server
Microsoft Flow allows you to define your own processes and workflows based on various triggers. More than 200 services such as Office 365, Facebook, WordPress etc. are available for this purpose, which can interact with each other in the workflows (called flows). These services offer actions as well as triggers, such as when a file is created (on Google Drive, DropBox or also on alternative services like e.g. box) or when a mail is received. Each flow has a trigger and may have multiple actions. This article describes how to connect combit Report Server to Microsoft Flow.
Swagger and OpenAPI Support for Report Server REST API
The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) defines a standard interface description for REST APIs, which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic.
Miscellaneous Treats in LL24
While I've been blogging about the major and most-UI-visible features during the last few months, of course there are gazillions of minor and less visible changes underneath the hood in LL24. This blog post sums up some more reasons to be cheerful.
Export Files Directly From the Preview
So far, it hasn't been possible to export to all of our export formats from the preview window. The simple reason is that we're using the EMF file format internally while the exporters need completely different information that cannot be extracted from the EMF. Thus, we were only able to support image file formats and – of course – PDF, which is created from EMF vector information.
Reporting REST with parameters, authenticating via tokens with the Report Server 24
This is the first of two blog posts presenting the new features of our combit Report Server in the upcoming version 24. Since the last version, in which the Report Server has become part of our List & Label developer component, the development teams of both products have been working even more closely together. This enables us to better coordinate the needs of both products, and thus also of our customers.
Introducing Parametrized Data Sources
List & Label's powerful filter options could not be used for all data sources so far. Reason is, especially for web based data sources, it is not possible or feasible to get "all" data first and then filter to the desired subset. The upcoming version 24 comes with a powerful new feature that addresses this very issue: Parametrized Data Sources. It allows to combine data source parameters with actual report parameters in the Designer.
