Reporting - Tips & Tricks (October 2019)

We had some terrific report-related feedback this month and wanted to share a few interesting support tickets with our developer community. Thank you for the continued support – we appreciate it

Enhancements

Before I get to the support tickets, I’d like to point to an important enhancement that was not included in our What’s New list for v19.2 release:

• With v19.2.3, you can embed fonts into a generated PDF file when exporting reports within Linux. To do so, you’ll need extra native dependencies such as ICU and Harfbuzz. Please review our online documentation for more information: ASP.NET Core Reporting - Docker Support.

• We enhanced our Arabic text layout algorithm when exporting reports within Linux (v19.2.3). Refer to the following screenshot for more information:

Source: Wikipedia

• With v19.2.4, you’ll be able to enable the DevExpress.XtraPrinting.Native.PrintingSettings.UseGdiPlusLineBreakAlgorithmstatic property to use the GDI+ line break algorithm for exported PDF files. This enhancement mostly affects the creation of PDF files with CJK (or Thai) fonts. You’ll be able to avoid any discrepancies in line breaks between report appearance within the print preview and an exported PDF file. Refer to the following table for a comparison of different PDF export modes (and associated print preview results):

Tips & Tricks

The following is a list of interesting support tickets we answered in October. Hopefully you’ll find them of value as you integrate our Reporting Tools in your next desktop or web project.

Reporting – Multiple Supported Platforms (WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, .NET Core)

• Data Binding - No data is displayed in a report when it is bound to an object array (T824408)
• How to display a report’s name or its display name in XRLabel (T822743)
• How to process Expression Bindings in code with the purpose of updating certain field names? (T821384)
• XRChart - How to define the Series color schema and fill mode (T824020)
• How to hide XRLabel that is bound to null data and free/shrink the space occupied by it? (T823581)
• Hierarchical Report - How to calculate summaries over child nodes (T823125)
• How to suppress the Group Footer if a report contains only a single group (T822281)
• How can I make a date value from a string in an Expression (T828343)
• How to format group summary labels in the BeforePrint event handler of the GroupFooter band (T824840)

WinForms Reporting

• How to add an End-User Report Designer to a .NET Core 3.0 WinForm application (T820922)
• XRDesignPanel - How to override the Open/Save commands when the designer is in SDI mode (T826249)
• How to generate a pdf from a System.Drawing.Printing.PrintDocument (T820491)

WPF Reporting

• DocumentPreviewControl - How to edit the XRRichText content in a print preview? (T828072)
• DocumentPreviewControl - Is there a “Calendar” view for providing the StartDate / EndDate parameters? (T720473)
• Memory Leaks - How to properly dispose of the WPF Report Designer and all currently opened documents? (T816711)

Web Reporting

• Export to DOCX - How to resolve the ‘Word found unreadable content…’ error (T821686)
• ASP.NET Core + Angular: Web Report Designer - How to run Open Report dialog automatically when the Report Designer is loaded (T826078)
• Web Document Viewer - The “Internal Server Error” error is thrown after migrating from ASP.NET Core 2.2 to 3.0 (T820352)
• Web Document Viewer - Exported document is displayed as a plain text in case the Response Caching middleware is enabled (T823836)
• Web Document Viewer - How to change the cursor over a certain report label (T821290)
• Web Report Designer loses an extra datasource that is added to the report’s ObjectStorage collection (T825626)
• Subreports in .NET Core - A subreport defined in the Visual Studio Report Designer is not rendered when the application runs (T824317)

Report & Dashboard Server

• Changing the Report Server’s default port number (83) before and after the installation (Q504440)

As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. If you’ve come across a useful Support Center ticket, feel free to share it with the DevExpress developer community below.

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