Intelligent Franking with Internetmarke

The process of getting snail mail ready for posting can be rather tiresome. You print your letters or invoices, enjoying the fine work you have done designing them in List & Label, and then? Even in our modern times you lick the stamp, assuming you have the right one at hand, and stick it on the envelope. How very old-school is that? With the upcoming version 22 of List & Label this process can be elegantly automated through Internetmarke, a service to pay for postage online by German courier company Deutsche Post AG.

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.

Lightning-fast Ad-hoc Design with Report Server 3

With combit Report Server 3, you now also have the ad-hoc Designer in addition to the design features from previous versions. Ad-hoc Design wizards enable you to create lists and diagrams (charts) quickly and easily. This combination equips the reliable and powerful Report Server with a quick and streamlined interface that is perfect for generating simple reports. The interface of the new wizards has also been optimized for devices that support touch-screen technology, which allows it to be easily operated on tablet devices as well.

Enabling Multiple Result Cells for Crosstabs

enabling multiple result cells for crosstabs
As this was one of the most frequent requested features in our feedback portal and we hadn't visited the crosstab's features for a couple of versions, this feature was an easy pick. A crosstab is aggregating values and groups them by two or even more dimensions. Until version 22, there was exactly one aggregation possible, e.g. you could have either the number of orders or the revenue sum per customer and year, not both. In LL22, there is no limit anymore.

Progress OpenEdge Reporting Tool List & Label 21

This time we feature a guest post from our partner and developer colleague Thomas Wurl. About two years ago, Thomas developed a free data provider for Progress OpenEdge available for all List & Label customers. While this provider was adopted successfully by many Progress users, it suffered some restrictions. So Thomas decided to restart from scratch and came up with an incredibly fast and powerful new solution. Here's his story. 

Introducing C++ Support for Multiple Report Containers

During our Roadshow this fall, the question I was asked the most was "why do you support certain features only for .NET". Most notably, multiple report containers (since LL20) and nested tables (since LL21) were only available for .NET databinding. The reason for this is the necessity to support a special and – until now – undocumented COM interface for passing the data to List & Label. We decided to leave this interface undocumented in version 20 in order to be free to apply changes without breaking customer code. We had to make sure the interface was ripe. Now we are and here we go.

Further Finetuning in the Designer

As with every release, we've added a lot of finetuning to the Designer and its objects. We haven't been able to cover each of the new features in the past LL21 blogpost feature marathon – there are just too many gems to uncover. So here are some of these new Designer features you don't want to miss that make working with LL smoother than ever before.