Well, here we are; my first blog post on the ComponentOne site and I’ve got good news for our ActiveReports developers. ActiveReports 7 is now available for download and purchase!
First, I’ll quickly introduce myself. I’m a Product Manager at ComponentOne working on ActiveReports (among other things); and I’ll be here to blog about all sorts of things ActiveReports related. You can read a few posts over at the older ClubFarPoint blogs where I briefly introduced the biggest new reporting feature, Fixed Page Layout (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
To recap from those posts: Fixed Page Layout (FPL) is a brand new reporting layout engine that isn’t available in any other .NET reporting tool! Its purpose is to give you complete control over the final layout of your report, making it incredibly easy to create reports that resemble traditional printed forms and reports. Stuff like: invoices, tax forms, bills, prospectus reports, etc.
How easy did we make it? Well, see for yourself! Here is a screenshot of the report in the designer, and when previewed.
You’ll notice a couple things right away. We’ve defined our table, and then under it is a gray shaded area. And to the right of it, is a large rectangular cutout, which if you view the large image you’ll see has the text “Table1 Overflow Placeholder” in it. In the preview those two areas are filled (well, mostly filled on the right) with the contents of the table.
So now you know what an overflow placeholder is for, it takes the data from a data region (such as a table or matrix, or any other data region that can grow) and continues it in another space designated for it. In this particular case if the area on the right were to be filled up we would create a new copy of the page and begin filling data in all over again.
That is a very simple example of what FPL does for report authors, it makes it easy to design a layout and know what its going to look like in the end. There is so much more to talk about in FPL and the other features in AR7 but I’ll save those for posts over the next few days!
‘Til next time!
- James
(+2 rating, 2 votes)
I use ActiveReports 7 in VS2008 Chines, when I add new item, the ActiveReports 7 not show in the “Add New Item” dialog. VS2008 English is OK.
Awesome question, this is something that had quite a bit of back and forth between the PMs and our writers. The primary difference comes down to rigidity of the pages.
In an FPL report you need to set the Fixed Size property of the data regions that grow in order to get them to fill a page. This size tells the control exactly how much room its allowed to take up on the page. Each page is rigidly defined as well, with you drawing on the surface of each page placing controls where they will wind up on the printed page later.
In CPL, when we generate a report we essentially create one huge canvas that the report is allowed to fill. Unlike FPL reports you’re given the Body of the report to work with to place report items and data regions on but those will get pushed around by controls growing. Pagination also doesn’t enter the equation until the end. So a table will grow its contents downwards as needed while a matrix will grow both vertically and horizontally pushing any items away that it runs into.
So the biggest questions to ask yourself when trying to choose between FPL and CPL is: Do I want the data to take up only a certain small chunk of space on each page? Does it matter if a report item gets moved around due to data growing controls? If you answer Yes to either of them, then FPL is likely the better fit.
For the most part, we think that users will be happy with FPL most of the time, however we did include the CPL options because it does have more available to users that want a less rigid layout or that want to display data from two different data sets within the same report.
There are some other differences as well between them, but I’ll write up a post about this more in-depth in the future.
hi james
the page layout include fpl and cpl. what are the defference between fpl and cpl. how can i choose the right layout.