ActiveReports Roadmap: A Look at 2018

With 2017 quickly coming to a close and a successful ActiveReports 12 release in November, it's time to look into the next year.

Web delivery: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, and React

Over the last year we've seen our customers moving towards a web delivery medium for their reports. They're migrating from WinForm apps to ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. Some are also going to Angular- or ReactJS-based web applications. With the last release, we delivered many features helping customers with their progress.

Over the last year we've seen our customers moving towards a web delivery medium for their reports.

In the coming year, we're planning to keep with the web direction to provide more tools for customers to migrate from the traditional report types to the more modern technologies. We all know that response times for report display on the web browser is very important to end users; we'll be looking at tools to help speed up the performance of ActiveReports even more.

Better performance for bigger datasets

Over the past year, we received great feedback from customers, and we've seen that dataset sizes for reports are exponentially increasing. Data management and rendering is the cornerstone for any report, so we'll be working on the rendering engine to work with larger datasets with the same or better performance over the next year.

With larger datasets, users are looking for new data visualization tools, as well. We're looking to add to the current charts available. We'll also be revamping the look and feel of the charts to make them easier to use and visualize data for an online target.

ActiveReports Server: web designer, more server availability

ActiveReports Server customers have shared feedback about the new web designer, and we plan to implement those and more enhancements for the web designer on the server.

Since the server reports inherits benefits of the ActiveReports reporting engine, we plan to leverage the performance and larger dataset support from the core engine in the server rendering.

With larger enterprises and software product vendors looking at using ActiveReports Server, we're looking at refactoring the architecture to leverage new technologies and make server available to IT teams with easier deployment and maintenance needs.

What do you think?

Though we've set a target for ourselves for the upcoming year, we always welcome feedback from customers. As always, we keep some time for customer-requested features and enhancements to the products. If you have something to suggest or something that you feel your project will benefit from, please share with us at us.sales@grapecity.com or leave a comment.

We have a full year planned for 2018. We're planning a few service packs for the current v12 and a major release during Fall 2018. Some of the additions I mentioned will be included in service packs, while other bigger impact changes will come with the major release later in the upcoming year.

Try ActiveReports 12

Try ActiveReports 12 Server