The Web Report Designer is an essential tool for using List & Label within web applications. We’re striving for constant improvements and enhancements – the plan is to add new features with each service pack we publish, until we’ll reach feature parity with the well-established Desktop Designer. Here’s a first glance what we were working on since the release.
In the last part of our blog post series, we’ll take a closer look at challenges that came up while developing the Web Report Designer – especially in regards to back-end requests, hotkeys and the formula editor.
This was a huge issue, that has been bugging us for years. While – generally speaking – List & Label’s level of printer control is unmatched by any competitor I know of, we always required a printer driver in order to execute this control. On the desktop, that’s all fine and well, as Microsoft conveniently provides the XPS Document Writer and – in more recent versions of Windows OS – the Microsoft PDF Writer. Those are always present and accessible. However, on the web and in the cloud, it’s a different story.
In our last blog post, we already announced it: this time, we’d like to address further challenges we encountered during our development of the Web Report Designer. Take advantage from what we learned, and maybe even use some bits for your own projects.
The rapidly increasing number of web apps has led to a great demand for web-based reporting solutions. We followed this trend with List & Label, and moved the Designer to the web – from version 27 on. One huge benefit, brought by the new Designer: way less effort, because only one front- and back-end needs to be developed and subsequently maintained. Naturally, the development of the new Web Report Designer presented us with technical challenges which we’d like to share with you – maybe knowing about our own learning curve is going to help you with your own projects, too.
While I've been blogging about the major and most-UI-visible features during the last few months, of course there are gazillions of minor and less visible changes underneath the hood in LL24. This blog post sums up some more reasons to be cheerful.
Extensibility is a first class citizen in the List & Label universe. You can add your own functions and objects to the Designer, enabling complex calculations within your code or custom objects. However, there was one important link missing so far – all this code just runs on the desktop. If your application runs on a server and you're using the Web Designer you're hosed – until version 24.
Until version 22, there was a number of restrictions for web based projects. As the Web Designer is a single project file designer, all the glory that comes with multiple project files like project templates, table of contents and index and – most prominently – drilldown support were not available as they couldn't be designed.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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