Faster reports, more flexible export, and the option to upload to secured FTP servers: The new Report Server 28 offers many new functions for its users. Some are customers’ wishes, like using project includes and subreports. This way, recurring elements such as letterheads, tables or charts can easily be reused in new report templates.
The Web Report Designer is a central element if you’re using List & Label in web applications. We’re constantly improving and adding to it, and with the release of version 28, we’ve added many new objects and functions again. Here’s a quick overview of the new features.
Up until version 27, you were able to use the HTML5 Viewer in your own .NET web applications in order to display a report preview directly in the browser. Interactive user actions such as drill down, filtering data using report parameters and much more were already possible. But the technology that was utilized for this is getting older now, as for example the jQuery framework. With the new Web Report Viewer, we have created a modern, highly compatible replacement, which has been available since version 27 (year 2021).
As we keep getting requests to support calling List & Label from an Azure Function, and – due to several restrictions like e.g. GDI sandboxing – List & Label can’t be used directly in this context, I thought it might be interesting to explore another way to the cloud, this time using the Report Server. Using its REST-API, you can even create reports from an Azure Function. But let’s walk through the process step by step.
The Web Report Designer is an essential tool for using List & Label within web applications. We’re striving for constant improvements and enhancements – the plan is to add new features with each service pack we publish, until we’ll reach feature parity with the well-established Desktop Designer. Here’s a first glance what we were working on since the release.
In the Report Server’s most current version, a few more exciting new features have been implemented, as a response to some customer requests. Overall, the new Report Server now visually integrates better into your application. Also, in addition to new actions for planned reports, it also offers additional enhancements for Excel export. Service Pack 27.001 will provide customers with a completely new preview.
In the last part of our blog post series, we’ll take a closer look at challenges that came up while developing the Web Report Designer – especially in regards to back-end requests, hotkeys and the formula editor.
This was a huge issue, that has been bugging us for years. While – generally speaking – List & Label’s level of printer control is unmatched by any competitor I know of, we always required a printer driver in order to execute this control. On the desktop, that’s all fine and well, as Microsoft conveniently provides the XPS Document Writer and – in more recent versions of Windows OS – the Microsoft PDF Writer. Those are always present and accessible. However, on the web and in the cloud, it’s a different story.
In our last blog post, we already announced it: this time, we’d like to address further challenges we encountered during our development of the Web Report Designer. Take advantage from what we learned, and maybe even use some bits for your own projects.
The rapidly increasing number of web apps has led to a great demand for web-based reporting solutions. We followed this trend with List & Label, and moved the Designer to the web – from version 27 on. One huge benefit, brought by the new Designer: way less effort, because only one front- and back-end needs to be developed and subsequently maintained. Naturally, the development of the new Web Report Designer presented us with technical challenges which we’d like to share with you – maybe knowing about our own learning curve is going to help you with your own projects, too.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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