Reporting – Tips & Tricks (November and December 2019)

In this tips & tricks post, we’ll discuss a couple of recent enhancements and share links to a few interesting technical support tickets. We hope the information in this post will be of value to those of you using DevExpress Reports. Should you have any suggestions for future tips & tricks post, please leave a comment below.

Our Most Recent Enhancements

The following is a list of our most recent enhancements. If you'd like more information about the features/capabilities listed below, please submit a comment or post a support ticket via the DevExpress Support Center.

Date Range Parameter Editor

As you probably know, we introduced Date Range Parameter support in our last release cycle. If you’ve yet to use this feature, please take a moment to review its capabilities and share your thoughts with us. We’d love to know what you think of our Mobile Mode implementation (Web Document Viewer).

Web Report Designer – Chart Cleaner Appearance

Our updated Web Report Designer (v19.2.5) uses SVG rendering to display charts. As you can see from the image below, rendering is now “cleaner.”

Report Designer – Easier Navigation

Have you ever wanted to customize a particular control, but were unable to do so because of report layout size and complexity? If so, you’ll be happy to know that our report desktop designer in v19.2.6 ships with a new “Navigate To Control” option – making navigation to a target component extremely easy (scrolling / expansion will be performed automatically).

Report Designer – Easier Alignment

Creating a perfect Excel file requires one to invest time in control alignment. We’ve already detailed some of the issues you may encounter in the following blog post: Troubleshooting Excel and CSV Export. With our next minor update (v19.2.6), you will be able to convert standalone report labels into a table (making alignment much easier).

Report Designer – Expand / Collapse All Bands

Here's yet another enhancement to our desktop End-User Report Designer components (v19.2.6). You can now quickly expand and collapse all report bands via context menu commands:

Document Management in Report & Dashboard Server

DevExpress Report & Dashboard Server now ships with a Documents Categories view (v19.2.5). This view allows you to group documents and process them in a batch:

Interesting Technical Support Tickets

Reporting – Moving from XRPivotGrid to XRCrossTab

• XRCrossTab - How to show multiline text? (T836862)
• XRCrossTab - How to prevent splitting columns content between two pages? (T836872)
• XRCrossTab - How to sort columns based on a certain field value? (T836827)
• XRCrossTab - How to hide vertical lines? (T836864)
• XRCrossTab - applying conditional background for the entire data row (T836838)
• XRCrossTab - applying conditional Font settings for particular data cells (T837388)

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

• PDF export with place holder for signing by clicking (T828850)
• Using Zebra bypass mode while printing an XtraReport object (T832836)
• How to print a rotated by 90 degrees XRRichText component? (T828360)
• How to manually validate all Binding Expressions used in an XtraReport? (T830379)
• Export to Excel - Negative TimeSpan values are not preserved and replaced with zeros (T835470)
• How do I get the GroupHeader’s print location in the content area of the page (T836384)

WinForms Reporting

• Document Viewer - How to customize the color and font of document map items (T831938)
• End-User Report Designer - XRDesignPanel doesn't refresh code in the Scripts window after updating ScriptSource programmatically (T832571)
• End-User Report Designer - How to remove unnecessary operators from the Filter Editor dialog (T833854)
• Report Designer - simplify the Data Source Wizard (T827936)

WPF Reporting

• DocumentPreviewControl - how to extend the "Export" drop-down list with a custom option? (T835715)
• How to put the DocumentPreviewControl's ribbon in simplified mode? (T831775)
• DocumentPreviewControl - is there a way to to make the page thumbnails tab the default one? (T829517)
• How to conditionally show/hide the Report Designer's Ribbon when it's merged into the other external Ribbon? (T834434)

Web Reporting

• Create a tool for moving XtraReports from .NET Framework to .NET Core (T756728)
• All text is rendered as square boxes in an .NET Core 3.0 application (T836730)
• How to use DevExpress HTML5/JS Document Viewer and Report Designer in a Vue.js application (T843838)
• ASPxWebDocumentViewer - Memory management with large reports (T837701)

Report & Dashboard Server

• How to change the log files directory? (T833274)

Documentation Updates

New Topics

• Date Range Parameters
• XRCrossTab class
• XRChart’s Parameters collection to visualize grouped data in reports
• Enchanced Filter Editor (WinForms)
• HTTP Export API (Report & Dashboard Server)

Updated Topics

• The JavaScript Reporting | Report Designer/DocumentViewer | Integration Examples section has been updated to show how to use npm instead of Bower.
• How to add the Report Designer and Document Viewer to Vue-based applications
• The description of the XRSubreport class has been updated according to your feedback.
• The PdfExportOptions.ShowPrintDialogOnOpen topic now lists the web browsers where the Print dialog cannot be displayed.
• The XRPictureBox.UseImageResolution property has been documented.
• An example has been added to the XRDesignPanel.RemoveCommandHandler method topic.
• An example has been added to the GetValueEventArgs.Row property topic.

Various End-User Documentation Updates

As you may know, we include end-user documentation for our Report Designer and Document Viewer controls. You can access this documentation on GitHub.

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 here.

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