Previewing v2009 vol 1: Reporting

Sort and Group Panel

In this release, we're introducing the Group and Sort Panel, which makes it easier to apply grouping and sorting to your report. You no longer need to manually add group header and footer bands, invoke their Group Fields editor dialog, create grouping fields and define their properties. This entire process can now be completed by a couple of clicks in our new panel.

Minor Improvements

We've implemented a few minor improvements from customer suggestions and requests:

• It is now possible to perform custom calculations within a calculated field. No longer are you restricted by the built-in functions and operators, but instead you can perform calculations to any level of complexity in the newly introduced CalculatedField.GetValue event.

• In previous versions, there was some ambiguity in designing reports when using an array of objects in an ITypedList data source: any child objects that were not contained in collections were ignored by the Field List. So, the child object would appear as a single property of the parent, but the child object's own properties weren't shown in the Field List. In order to show the child objects along with their properties, customers using ORM systems (for example our XPO product) had to create a collection with a single child object associated with that parent object's property. From v2009.1, the parent/child objects are now displayed correctly, even if the child objects are not collections. So, it's now possible to show 1:1 related objects in reports.

• A new localization improvement removes the discrepancy between how a property is named in the End-User Designer's Property Grid and in the Smart Tag. Their display names now coincide.
• With this new release, exporting is carried out using postbacks only in ASP.NET. This is a more reliable approach when compared with the callback algorithm used before, and avoids various problems when exporting a report on the client side using the different web browsers.

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