Enhanced PDF Export

png in pdf export before result
The PDF export in List & Label 21 supports Type3 fonts as embedding option. Unicode and symbol characters are stored as Glyphs in this embedding mode. This way, these fonts are supported optimally – you no longer need to download font packages for your favorite PDF viewer.

Scripting Support in Functions

List & Label has a very powerful formula language. Most manipulations one could think of are possible out of the box or can be realized by using a user defined designer function. However, the latter requires you as a developer to think of the need before deploying your application. In LL21, we'll introduce a new feature that allows to use C# or scripting host languages like VBScript directly in the function wizard.

New and Overhauled Data Providers

The ObjectDataProvider is one of the key providers we ship with LL. It binds to generic lists just as well as to EntityFramework or other Object Relational Mapper data. It is also the final fallback for all datasources that cannot be handled by one of the other providers. In LL21, the provider got a couple of new features for the .NET 4.0 assembly.

New Web Designer

web report designer loading
Until version 21, we used browser specific plug-ins or ActiveX controls in order to display the Designer right in the browser. However, browser vendors are more and more restrictive and begin to ban plugins from their browsers altogether. Thus, it was time for a new technology.

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.

Designer Preview Support for Xbase++

Today, I spoke at the Xbase Forum Meeting in Potsdam, Germany. Besides presenting what our reporting tool can do I had the joy and honor to share my presentation with Tom Liehr, a respected member of the Xbase++ community. Together we've created a modified sample for Xbase++ that shows how to support the designer preview in Xbase++. Or – better said – Tom did most of the hard work while I stood flabbergasted at the sideline. I was only able to give some hints that helped crossing the finish line just in time which was Easter Monday, 10:30 pm.

Two Ways to Reuse Existing Objects In New Projects

The idea for this post was triggered by a comment by MikeH on the last blog post. He requested the feature to have a kind of meta object containing different other objects in a pre-specified manner in order to speed things up for endusers. There are already a couple of features that cover at least similar use cases and I thought I'd highlight them.