What's New in .NET Reports: FlexReport for UWP, FlexReport Designer, and FlexViewerPane

2016 v1 is an exciting release for the FlexReport product line: not only have we updated the UI of the FlexReport Designer app, but we've added betas for FlexReport for UWP, FlexViewerPane, and FlexViewer for MVC.

FlexReport for UWP (Beta): Features and Differences from WinForms

FlexReport for UWP uses the same overall approach as the WinForms version – the .NET report is generated locally within a UWP application (as opposed to being generated on a server). The application is self-contained, so there's no need to write a separate web service to provide the reports.

Enhanced Rendering for .NET Reports

FlexReport for UWP uses modern rendering using DirectWrite/DirectX technology to draw/generate report content. This improves the quality and fidelity of text, shape, and border rendering.

Preview control for FlexReport

Add report previewing capabilities using FlexViewerPane (Beta) control for UWP. The viewer can load FlexReport. In addition, the viewer provides options to set layout of the reports, and zoom settings like actual size, page width, etc. The viewer control supports printing the reports.

Loading C1Report

FlexReport for UWP cannot directly load legacy C1Report report definition files (.xml). In order to load a C1Report, convert the C1Report.xml file to FlexReport (.flxr) using C1FlexReportDesigner.exe App installed with the C1UWP installer. Then load the FlexReport (.flxr) in FlexViewerPane control.

Supported Report Fields

Hierarchy for field types with common base: FlexReport for UWP uses different class types (with a common base) to represent different types of report fields, including:

TextField
CheckboxField
ImageField
BarcodeField
ShapeField
SubreportField
ParagraphField.

FlexReport for UWP Beta does not currently support ChartField, RTFField and LegacyFields that have RTF property True.

Exporting

Add exporting capabilities to your UWP applications by exporting FlexReport to:

RTF
XLSX
BMP
PNG
JPEG
GIF
TIFF

Supported Data Providers

In the 2016v1 release, the following data providers are supported by FlexReport:

DataProvider.ExternalObject
DataProvider.SQLite

DataProvider.XmlFile is not supported yet, but will be supported in one of the coming releases. Since there is no ADO.NET on UWP, the following data providers are not supported, and cannot be supported, in the UWP version of FlexReport:

DataProvider.OLEDB
DataProvider.ODBC
DataProvider.SqlServerCe3_5
DataProvider.SqlServerCe4_0

Trying to generate a report that uses an unsupported data provider will generate an exception. As in the WinForms version, the DataSource.RecordSet property allows you to directly specify a user object implementing the IC1FlexReportRecordset or the IList interface, as the data source.

Changes in Public Properties and Methods

Certain properties and methods are changed in the UWP version of FlexReport to make its use easier:

The type of C1FlexReport.BasePath and C1FlexReport.DefaultBasePath properties in the UWP version is StorageFolder.
Method overloads accepting a StorageFile as the argument were added to C1FlexReport.Save(…) and C1FlexReport.Load(…).

Limitations

Metafiles are not supported; metafiles added will not display in the report.
The C1FlexReport.Print(…) methods are not supported.

View documentation for FlexReport for UWP >>

II. FlexViewer for MVC (Beta)

Now take advantage of advanced HTML5 based viewer control for previewing FlexReport, C1Report in MVC applications. Read more in the in-depth FlexViewer blog post.