ActiveReports 9
What's New

We have made a number of changes and added new features since the last version of ActiveReports. Following are some of the major highlights of this release.

Save and Open Reports from the Server

Developers using the Visual Studio Report Designer and End Users using the End User Designer now have the ability to interact with reports stored on the ActiveReports Server directly from the designer menu. Users can open, modify, save and also add newly created reports to the server directly from the ActiveReports Designer. As the reports are stored and published to the server, users can also work with the Report Versions that are stored in the ActiveReports Server. Each time a report is saved or a new report is added to the server, a revision is created for that report.

Learn MoreWorking with Save and Open Reports from Server


Layers

The new Layers feature in ActiveReports 9 provides you with the ability to add a named group of controls to your report. Lock or unlock, add or remove, show or hide these group of controls based on your requirement and also determine which Layers to view, print or export. Layers makes it easy to design complex reports with complex layouts. This feature is particularly useful when you want to trace the layout of a pre-printed form or modify a template report without changing the existing report layout. Layers also make designing complex layouts easy by allowing you to modify one aspect of the report such as static labels or bound data without modifying the entire report layout.


Learn More | Working with LayersView, Export or Print Layers| Tracing Layers

Visual Query Designer

Simplify query designing further with the Visual Query Designer from ActiveReports. It is a graphical interface that improves on the data binding experience by allowing users to interactively build queries and view the results. With the Visual Query Designer's interactive interface, users who are unfamiliar with SQL can also design, edit and preview queries.

Key features of the Visual Query Designer include:

Learn More | Query Building With Visual Query Designer | Using the Visual Query Designer

TableofContents Control

TableofContents (ToC) is a new control used to display an organized hierarchy of report heading levels and labels along with their page numbers in the body of a report. With this control, you can easily embed a contents structure within your report and then render and print it. This control is available in both Page and RDL Reports.

Learn More | Add TableOfContents | Reports with TableOfContents

RDL Reports

Continuous Page Layout (CPL) reports have now been renamed to Report Definition Language (RDL) reports. RDL reports are available as a report template in your Visual Studio project and are also available as a separate item that can be added in Visual Studio. You also get a separate RDL report template in the Stand-alone designer now.


Report Definition Language (RDL) Report

Excel Rendering Extension

When exporting your files to Microsoft Excel, you now have an option of using Excel Rendering Extensions. This extension provides improved exporting performance with greater layout accuracy for RDL and Page Reports in Microsoft Excel. It also supports a number of interactive features like Bookmarks, Drill-down and Hyperlinks.


Learn More | Rendering to Excel

Independent Rounded Corners (Section Reports)

ActiveReports now allows you to interactively set rounded corners for Shape and CrossSectionBox controls in Section Reports. You simply need to specify the radius for each corner separately using handlers provided in these controls. 

Shape | CrossSectionBox

Setting FixedSize Property with Resize Handlers

The FixedSize property of a Page Report can now be set using the resize handlers that appear at the edges of the data region at design time. Drag the resize handlers to interactively set the exact height or width (or both) that the data region will occupy at runtime.

Set FixedSize of a Data Region

Design Time Performance Optimization

Performance of the page report designer has been improved significantly in ActiveReports 9 to enhance the design time user experience. Common designer operations such as panning, resizing of controls, scrolling have been tested thoroughly with upto a 1000 controls and the performance of the Page Report Designer is now comparable to that of the Section Report Designer.

See Also

Getting Started

How To

Concepts

Walkthroughs

 

 


Copyright © 2016 GrapeCity, inc. All rights reserved

Support Forum