Create Functional Dashboards in Seven Easy Steps

Complex data is usually processed visually in dashboards in order to be able to capture trends, outliers or up-to-date data at a glance. The design of dashboards depends on important details. These details make the difference between whether the information is interesting for the target group and whether conclusions can be drawn from it or not. For example, a bar chart is better to capture than to work your way through hundreds of table entries. Dashboards are often used incorrectly and are hopelessly overloaded with numerous different charts and gauges, such as traffic lights, speedometers and hardly readable tables.

How to Automatically Export Reports to Cloud Storage Services

With List & Label you can export reports in different formats like PDF, Word, Excel and many more. The resulting reports can either be stored directly in the file system or – in .NET – in a stream, in order to transfer them manually into a database, a document management system or similar. Reports can also be automatically stored directly in so-called cloud storage services. The cloud storage providers for GoogleDrive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox are available in List & Label for .NET for this purpose.

New Connection to Microsoft Flow for the Report Server

Microsoft Flow allows you to define your own processes and workflows based on various triggers. More than 200 services such as Office 365, Facebook, WordPress etc. are available for this purpose, which can interact with each other in the workflows (called flows). These services offer actions as well as triggers, such as when a file is created (on Google Drive, DropBox or also on alternative services like e.g. box) or when a mail is received. Each flow has a trigger and may have multiple actions. This article describes how to connect combit Report Server to Microsoft Flow.

Export Files Directly From the Preview

So far, it hasn't been possible to export to all of our export formats from the preview window. The simple reason is that we're using the EMF file format internally while the exporters need completely different information that cannot be extracted from the EMF. Thus, we were only able to support image file formats and – of course – PDF, which is created from EMF vector information.

Supporting SVG as Image Format

The Scalable Vector Graphics format has been around for quite a while. The first specification was released in 2001, and meanwhile all browsers offer solid support for SVG. During the years, we've received a couple of requests to support SVG in List & Label. Initially, I was hoping for Microsoft to make SVG rendering support a Windows feature that we could just use. However, that hasn't happened so far. And so we had to come up with a different solution.

Introducing Enterprise Level Logging Support

Screenshot of apache chainsaw capturing list & labeldebug output

For you as an enterprise application developer, logging is probably one of the essential features of your app. It enables you to trace and see what the user did just before the app went blank, and see if the typical user answer "I haven't done anything" proves right or wrong. To support you in this task, logging was built into List & Label from the very start.