Building a full reporting system for WinForms & WPF with List & Label

reporting system for winforms and wpf apps

Desktop business applications eventually hit the same reporting problem: users want new reports, PDF exports, Excel output, print previews, and layout changes without waiting for another release. For development teams, that usually means a choice between piling up custom export code or building a reporting framework from scratch. List & Label offers a more practical option: embed reporting directly into your WinForms or WPF application while keeping control of your data, permissions, and user experience. This guide shows how to integrate it in a way that is practical, scalable, maintainable, and built for real-world line-of-business software.

We’re evolving: List & Label Cross Platform

List & Label Cross Platform for Linux and more

Maybe you’ve already seen it on our social networks, our website, or in our livestream: at combit, we’re currently working on a new, forward-looking offshoot of List & Label—a cross-platform reporting solution that will primarily run on Linux. Internally, we call this project List & Label Cross Platform (LL-CP). It is aimed primarily at developers looking for a stable, high-performance, and modern reporting solution.

Reporting in Your Applications with Embarcadero RAD Studio

reporting in embarcadero rad studio delphi

List & Label is a reporting component that integrates with applications to provide them with rich reporting capabilities. It allows developers to create sophisticated reports based on data from any source. Easy data binding for your own VCL applications is provided by List & Label’s FireDAC component, which supports numerous data sources such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, SQLite, DB2, MySQL and PostgreSQL, as well as many other databases and formats. The control over the data for reporting always remains with the application itself.

InMemoryDataProviderWrapper: Data Provider on Steroids

The features of different data providers vary widely. Depending on the data source, sorting, native aggregate functions or filters at database level may be available directly. Or not. For example, none of this is available in file-based formats such as JSON or XML, or even in “web” formats such as REST. These are typically read “front to back” and therefore cannot offer sorting or native aggregation. With List & Label 29, we have something new to offer.

New Web Report Designer and Web Report Viewer Features in List & Label 29

List & Label’s most recent version 29 is coming along with quite a fe exciting news for the Web Report Designer and the Web Report Viewer. These updates provide improved functionalities and enhanced usability to developers and end users alike.

Enhanced Drag & Drop Support in the Designer

A frequently asked question was: “Why can’t I see the relations in the report designer?” This question refers to the variable/field window, in which 1:1 relationships were displayed, but not (the usually much more important) 1:n relationships. In short, our answer was always: “The relations are there, but only in the object window, e.g. when creating tables”. We even put the long answer in a Knowledgebase article.