Service Pack 26.001 for List & Label and the Report Server

service pack box 26.001 in screen

The first Service Pack for List & Label 26 has been released. What are the new features and improvements? In this blog post we give you an overview. Each entry was taken directly from the English Readme.

Finally – a Glance in the Crystal Ball

An often required feature for "this cannot be done" type of problems is looking into the future. Things like "don't print this group if it doesn't contain record xy" or "print a reference to the page number of an item that's printed way later". Before List & Label 26, there was no simple solution to this and the magic had to be done in the application if possible at all. Starting with List & Label 26, we'll introduce a new feature that's aimed at solving exactly challenges like this.

New DataProvider for Redis

Redis is an in-memory key-value database, so a typical NoSQL database. Since its initial release in 2009, it has become quite popular and now is, according to db-engines.com by far the most popular key-value database out there. With the new RedisDataProvider you can now use your Redis database within List & Label or Report Server.

Building a Better Databinding Ecosystem for Delphi

Data provider for Delphi

The IDataProvider interface for .NET has enabled many features that are not available for all of the other platforms so far. Most importantly, it brings multiple report containers and nested tables. For C++, we’ve included a sample in LL21. This is sadly missing in Delphi. In addition, the current Delphi data-binding engine still works against the BDE, a technology that has been deprecated quite a while ago by Embarcadero.

Support for Nested Tables

example for nested tables
One of the few requests that kept coming in was "Can we have the detail data in a column of the master table". While there are a couple of workarounds in version 20 that do similar things, the actual request could not be fulfilled this way. Plus, the workarounds were not as discoverable as we would have loved them to be as they included negative indents for line definitions and educated guesses on the number of detail records that are likely to be printed.This is going to change in version 21 – List & Label is going to support a new field type "table" which enables you to nest tables.

Great new Features for .NET Developers

Support-for-1-1-Relations-2.png

The improvement of our support for .NET has been a major focus in our feature planning process since the initial .NET beta release in early 2001. As more and more IDE vendors adopt CLR support for their languages and join the .NET community, .NET has become ever more important. Thus, version 20 will feature a wide range of new .NET features that make List & Label even more versatile when using it with CLR languages.

Supporting Multiple Report Containers

Since we introduced the report container in List & Label 11, the one remaining feature request that kept coming in was “could we have multiple report containers, please”. Many cases can be covered by using a multi-columnar layout for the report container as a workaround or combining distances between container elements and changes in alignment to get the visual impression of separated tables. But these workarounds are not very discoverable and they are just that – workarounds.
In version 20 we’ll introduce a brand new databinding mode for the .NET component which will replace the old one seamlessly. You won’t need to apply any code changes to profit from this new mode. However, under the hood things will be working quite different then.