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.

What Our ALM Toolchain Looks Like

I'd like to take the time after the release of LL21 to give you a short tour of what our ALM tool chain looks like. You probably have the same needs and challenges in your everyday jobs that we have. It was a process of trial and error until we arrived at our current configuration. While we are happy with it for the time being, it's always good to keep an eye on new stuff – so this is the current state of development as of 01/2016 :-).

REST API for combit Report Server

order overview screenshot
In our very first blogpost we announced to share updates about the ongoing development of all our products. Until now we put an emphasis on the development of our reporting tool List & Label. But now the time has come to open that focus and give insights on other product news right out of our dev department. That’s why we proudly present our first blogpost on our BI solution combit Report Server:

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.

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.

Improved Handling of Default Fonts

In version 20, we started to blog about upcoming features in List & Label. I'd like to stick to this new tradition and share new features in version 21 to give you an idea of what we're working on. As always, comments are appreciated very much. If you have new ideas to share, you'll also want to visit our feedback portal. See our April blogpost if you haven't worked with the portal before. So, without any further ado I'll share the first new feature with you – an improved default font handling.