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.

New and Extended Designer Objects

In version 20 you see the debut of a brand new Designer object: the checkbox. This object is used to indicate if a boolean value (a condition) is met or not. Think of visualizing the availability of a product, the selected menu in a hotel etc. And the OLE object just got a major overhaul.

Combining the Report Structure and Object Tool Windows

changing the order in which objects are printed

The two tool windows you'll probably use the most in the report designer of our List & Label reporting tool are the "Objects" window and the "Report Structure" window. The "Objects" window enables you to quickly select an object in order to change its properties and contents. The "Report Structure" window is used to configure the specific contents of a report container object, i.e. tables and subtables, charts, crosstabs and Gantt charts.