Reporting: Pre-Printed Forms and the new ASP.NET Document Viewer Control (What’s New in 13.2)

Today I want to talk about two new features we are adding to our rich set of reporting tools in our upcoming 13.2 release.

Pre-Printed Forms

I recently taught a reporting class (there’s another one soon: sign up!) where one of the attendees mentioned frustration with creating reports based on pre-printed forms. These types of reports are very common. A great example of this type of form here in the US is the 1040 EZ tax form:

In our upcoming release we are making super easy to create these kinds of reports! Above you can see the 1040EZ form along with a couple of XRLabels used as placeholders for data. The way to get this to work is really simple:

1. Create an image of your pre-printed form
2. Set the image as the report watermark
   
   
3. Set the DrawWatermark property of the report to true
   

Done! Now you can create a report based upon your specific forms with pinpoint accuracy in no time.

ASP.NET Document Viewer Control

This happens to be my favorite feature for reporting in this release. As we have been striving to eliminate the cruft from your development experience, we have done a number of consolidations when it comes to our WinForms End User Report Designer (last release) and have simplified some of the more common aspects of creating reports (creating tables, labels etc.). The new ASP.NET Document Viewer Control represents another step in that direction. In summary we went from this:

to this:

Here is our thinking – why should we require you, dear user, to drag 4 different things on to the design surface when really one will suffice. After all, it is the report itself which defines whether or not the parameters panel or the document map are needed. Now it is simply one control:

There are a couple of other goodies that we have added to this control! The first is this notion of a Remote Report. When you click on that link you get the following dialog box:

Now the Document Viewer can connect directly to a report service or even the Report Server itself! Cut to the scene where the Report Server has a conversation with our new ASP.NET Document Viewer:

.

I will talk more about the implication of this approach later on when I delve into the new features of the Report Server.

The second thing we have added to the smart tag is a unified way of selecting a predefined theme. Here is the final report displayed in this brand new control with the Metropolis Blue theme:

I am pretty excited about the direction we are taking with our analysis products. We are committed to simplifying the development experience while still providing robust data visualization tools at an affordable price.

As always, if there are any comments and/or questions, feel free to get a hold of me!

Seth Juarez
Email: sethj@devexpress.com
Twitter: @SethJuarez

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