ActiveReports.NET v16.1 Has Released

We’re pleased to announce the release of ActiveReports 16.1, our first update to ActiveReports 16, released back in January. This release is a free update for all ActiveReports 16 users and comes with several new features, including: 

• Silent Printing in JSViewer and WebViewer controls
• Customize and hide Common Values and Expressions collections
• Performance Improvements
• Charts Enhancements: Expressions in Rule Condition
• Moving dialog boxes
• Design Surface Rulers
• Excel Export keeps Frozen settings

JSViewer and WebViewer

Both the JSViewer and WebViewer controls come with built-in printing capability via a print dialog so users can select how they print their reports. Many times, you want to simplify printing by not displaying the Print Process dialog box.

With this release, you can set the 'silentPrint' property of the viewer to enable this functionality: 

viewer = GrapeCity.ActiveReports.JSViewer.create( { element: ‘#root', *silentPrint: true*} )

Web Report Designer

The Web-based Report Designer is one of our most popular controls because of its ease of use and flexibility. The feature we have implemented for the Web-based Report Designer is the ability to add Rulers. Similar to MS Word having vertical and horizontal rulers to adjust page margins, you can now add rulers to your design surface for not only WYSIWYG measurements but also for easily adjusting margins.

Previously, you would adjust your report margins in the Properties panel of the report. Now, you can simply drag the ruler edges to do so. By default, the rulers are disabled. To enable them, you can use something like:

designerOptions.rulers = {
    visible: true, // default: false
    snapStep:    {
        in: number, // default: 0.25<
        cm: number, // default: 0.5
    }
}, 

Other Features

There are a few other enhancements and features in addition to what is listed above. In this release, we've enhanced our Excel Data Export to support exporting frozen rows and columns within the Table and Tablix controls. Additionally, we've enhanced the Rules feature to allow you to compare two plots.

To do this, we've enabled support for Expressions in the Condition property of Rules and added the corresponding CurrentValue(), NextValue(), and PreviousValue() functions to evaluate each data point. This gives you a lot more latitude and flexibility to control the runtime behavior of your charts so you can create charts that indicate in red any values of the financial plot that are lower than the linear plot: 

Finally, we've also implemented specific measures to improve our engine's performance when retrieving data and upon export to Excel.