* What's new in ActiveReports 6 Standard?
* What's new in ActiveReports 6
Professional?
ActiveReports 6 Standard Edition includes the following new features.
World-Class Performance and Even Better Quality
If you
admired ActiveReports for its world-class quality and speed with over 50,000
users worldwide, you will love version 6 even more. The new version contains a
number of improvements to enhance the performance and quality of the reporting
engine, making it better, faster and smarter than ever before.
Visual Studio 2008 Support
ActiveReports 6 is fully
supported in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
64 bit support
ActiveReports 6 is fully functional in an
x64 computing environment. Any application using ActiveReports 6 can run on
64-bit machines to render their reports. Support for x64 processing is available
both at run time and in Microsoft Visual Studio at design time.
New Reduced Space Symbology (RSS) Bar Codes
ActiveReports
has always had excellent integrated bar code functionality that saved you time
and effort. The new version supports six new barcode symbologies. You can use
the new Reduced Space Symbology (RSS) styles to encode Composite Component (CC)
extended EAN and UPC information in less space. The new styles are RSS14,
RSS14Truncated, RSS14Stacked, RSS14StackedOmnidirectional, RSSExpanded, and
RSSExpandedStacked.
External Style Sheets for a Consistent Look
You asked for
it and now you have it! ActiveReports has a new external style sheet feature so
that you can now easily share the look of your favorite report with other
reports. Styles selected for text and labels can now be exported to an XML-based
style sheet and imported and applied to another report at run time or at design
time. Styles are applied by the Reporting engine before reports are run.
New Report Designer Enhancements
The ActiveReports
Designer makes creating great looking reports even easier with the new design
tools introduced in this version.
New Cross Section Controls
You can now design great
looking reports in ActiveReports using the new cross section controls. Drop one
of the cross section controls into any header section, and it automatically
grows dynamically and stretches across any intervening sections to its related
footer section. The CrossSectionLine control renders a dynamically growing
vertical line and the CrossSectionBox control renders a rectangular outline with
corners that can be rounded by setting the radius property.
New Snap Lines
The ActiveReports designer uses the new
snap lines by default. Snap lines allow you to glide your controls freely
instead of snapping to a grid (which is still available in Report Settings).
They assist with alignment via blue horizontal and vertical lines that appear
when your control comes into alignment with other controls or section edges. In
other words, you get the best of both — easily move controls on the design
space, plus align perfectly with other controls should you decide to do so.
Direct Input in Text, Label and Check-Box Controls
Double-click inside the ActiveReports TextBox control or select it and press the
F2 key to edit text directly in the control instead of using the Properties
window. If you do use the Properties window, the Text property now supports
multi-line text input.
Text Justify Feature in Text Controls
Text justification
in ActiveReports TextBox and Label controls now also supports single character
justification. When you set the Alignment property to Justify, the new
TextJustify property extends your justification options to include Auto
(default), Distribute and DistributeAllLines.
Text Padding for Labels and TextBox Controls
The
ActiveReports TextBox control now has a Padding property with five settings at
design time: All, Left, Top, Right, and Bottom. More settings, like Vertical and
Horizontal, are available in code. The All property has a default value of -1,
which means that all of the Padding values are not equal. Change this value to
10, and a space ten pixels wide is left around the text on all sides. The Left,
Top, Right, and Bottom properties are 0, 0, 0, 0 by default.
Patterns to Fill Empty Spaces
In the ActiveReports
designer, the new RepeatToFill property allows your green bar or other
formatting to fill the page even if your data doesn't. For the simplest example,
if you have a report with a PageHeader, Detail, and PageFooter section, and the
detail section has a background color set, the background color on the last page
would normally end with the data, and then the PageFooter section would render
at the bottom of that page, leaving a white gap between the two sections. With
the RepeatToFill property set to True however, the last page of the report would
have the background color extending down to just above the PageFooter, leaving
no white space.
Image Annotations
Now you can add images to your
annotations on reports in the ActiveReports viewer. The Annotations feature was
first introduced with ActiveReports version 3.0. Annotations allow you to pass
on special comments and instructions for the end users viewing your reports.
ActiveReports 6 Professional includes all of the new features from the Standard Edition.
In addition, it contains the following new features.
64 bit support
The Professional Edition provides the same
level of x64 support as the Standard Edition and adds x64 support in the End
User Report Designer for Windows Forms.
Flash Report Viewer for ASP.NET
ActiveReports 6
Professional Edition now includes a Flash-based report viewer that you can use
to provide a seamless, interactive report viewing experience and no-touch
printing using the widely-adopted Adobe Flash Player already installed on end
user desktops. Choose from pre-defined themes (including Office, Windows XP,
Vista and Windows Classic) and enhance the viewer experience by controlling the
printing, paging, table of contents, thumbnail views and other options. This
feature requires Adobe Flash version 10 or higher.
PDF Report Signatures and Timestamps
The well known PDF
reporting features of ActiveReports just got even better in the Professional
Edition. While exporting .NET reports to PDF, you can now digitally sign your
reports with a hidden signature or with visible text and graphics. Personalise
your signature using sixteen attributes. Use the signature to validate the
report author, and a Certification Level attribute to control user access. Use
the new Time Stamp feature to create third-party authorised versions of your
documents. These features are fully compatible with Adobe's new security
guidelines.
ToolStrips Instead of Toolbars
The ActiveReports End User
Report Designer now offers a better Toolbar by leveraging the latest Visual
Studio ToolStrip control instead of the old CommandBar control.
Redistributable Help for the End User Report Designer
You
asked for a help file for the End User Report Designer that you could distribute
to your end users, and now you've got it. ActiveReports Professional Edition
developers can deploy the compiled CHM file and PDF file out of the box or use
the included Innovasys HelpStudio 3 User Guide project to customise it and
compile your own CHM or PDF file. (Requires HelpStudio version 3.) This feature
is only available in the Professional Edition of ActiveReports.