Trayko Stoilov's Blog

The new Reporting designer - New user experience for everyone

Trayko Stoilov — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:07:00 GMT

Have you ever been addicted to something? Well I am now in the Q1 2008 Telerik Reporting Designer. The new state of the art design surface, available in Visual Studio, will definitely grab you from the very beginning. It will bring new user experience to all of you who like your reports to look better then just a list of records, items and numbers. But let me start from the beginning.

The graph paper background of the designer is specially chosen to assist you in designing your layout and gives you an excellent visual presentation of what your report will look like when finished. Positioning items on the report is the easiest thing ever; the designer gives you the unique abilities to see how far your items are from the section and page borders, and to snap your items to the grid! Talking about Easibility!

Have you ever had a huge report with many small items which you could barely select? The new zoom option comes to rescue and now you can select your items freely.

Many of you would say "Yes, but then it will be hard to navigate through a large report when it is zoomed". True, but we thought of this as well! We have added a novel Fast Navigation Map which shows the section that you see on your screen and allows you to easily get to the report item you want to reach.

And here is probably the most important feature. It has always been a challenge to align items to one another for that perfect report. Until now you had to move them on the surface to the desired position and then align them exactly through the Location property. This is no more! Telerik Reporting allows you to snap items not only to the grid, but to snap-lines of other objects. This will help you line up your items perfectly every time.

The new design surface solves another common problem existent in the previous versions - overlapping items. For one, HTML does not support overlapping items and this was a frequent issue when using Telerik Reporting in web applications. Now, the new designer will alert you if you have items that overlap each other, and will show a yellow icon with an exclamation mark.

If this wasn't enough, we added intuitive item rotation, which you can do with a flick of your mouse. Now you can rotate your text and shapes at any angle you want.

Unbelievable? Give it a try and create your unique report. And finally, you will get so exited by your creation that you would love to show it to everyone. Then don't wait. Enter the Telerik Reporting Challenge and win our great prizes.

Win free goodies for working with Telerik Reporting

Trayko Stoilov — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:29:19 GMT

Have you felt proud of the way your reports look? Or may be happy with the time it took to create them with Telerik Reporting? Let everyone see how creative you are and get the well deserved recognition for your work!

A few days ago we started the Telerik Reporting contest - a contest in which everyone who submits a Telerik Reporting case study that meets�certain requirements�win a prize of his choice:

1 year Subscription extension;
Free Telerik Reporting license;
$300 discount towards the next purchase.

The winner will be selected based on the community votes. Every case study will be rated on a 1 to 4 scale and the case study which receives the highest cumulative score will be announced as a winner and will receive an amazing $1,000 Amazon gift coupon.

More information about the contest you can find on the official�Telerik Reporting Contest page.

Join the battle; be creative; deliver your reports with Telerik quality.

Q1 2008 Reporting RoadMap updated

Trayko Stoilov — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:23:58 GMT

Well into the Q1 2008 release, I am pleased to announce the development plans for Telerik Reporting Q1 2008. With the release expected in April, we will introduce several awesome features:

UI for Report parameters
Telerik Reporting will expose dedicated parameters UI to allow end users to pass parameters to a report in both Win and Web Viewers. Parameters are used to manipulate the report's data. This will help the user to vary the output of a report at runtime based on values that are preset.

Label reports
The label addition to the report wizard will let the end users to create label reports with ease, choosing from a number of standard label formats (avary, etc.).
When creating a new report with the Report Wizard developers will have the option of selecting a label from a number of standard formats, or creating a custom one if needed; the generated report will be customized according to the selected label specification.

Export to RTF
In 2007, we introduced Export to Excel, so naturally the next in line is support for document that we can open and manipulate with MS Word-like applications. Exporting reports in RTF will enable the end users to view/edit them through MS Word, Open Office or whatever word editor they are using, regardless of the version and operating system. RTF uses the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), PC-8, Macintosh, or IBM PC character set to control the representation and formatting of the document.

Custom Report Items
Our customers are still in front of us, especially when demanding better support of custom implementations. In Q1 2008, we have decided to end the "catch up" game by providing an extension to the reporting engine that would enable developers to add custom functionality and/or extend existing Telerik Reporting functionality. We will document the custom report items in order to make the extension process easy and effortless.

These are the major features we will introduce in Q1 2008. We also expect to enhance several aspects of the existing functionality to bring the usability of the tool to a new level. We are very exited about all the new stuff,�and we will do our best to keep you posted on our progress towards Q1 2008.

New Telerik Reporting case studies

Trayko Stoilov — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:18:07 GMT

I am happy to note that there are two new Telerik Reporting case studies added to the website. The fellows from�Kangarooware, LLS and�Wil-Trans were very kind to send us their impressions on working with Telerik Reporting.

Kangarooware www.surplusims.com
Kangarooware was founded in June of 2006 by John A. Fuqua, former Chief Technology Officer of Go Figure, Inc. (World's Largest Membership Management Software Company) in quest for delivering enterprise quality software and technology services to small and medium business. They needed to design an application that gives management greater visibility of neglected valuable inventory resulting in cost savings

"We chose Telerik Reporting based on its simplicity, ease of deployment, and track record in the ASP.NET component industry. The most enticing feature was that everything was done in C#. Most of the other tools we looked at support some variation or a VB Script type language. It was important that we kept the development language unified. We tried using several alternatives, Crystal Reports and Microsoft Reporting Services, but these turned out to be very cumbersome, difficult to deploy, and left you writing logic in a foreign language. Telerik was easy and fast."

Wil-Trans�www.wil-trans.com
Wil-Trans is a trucking company located in Strafford, MO, US. Started in 1990 by former drivers with 12 trucks, today they operate over 150 trucks hauling refrigerated freight across the continental United States. For the growing business, they needed a reporting solution so their users can access real-time reports across multiple data sources anytime from anywhere in the world and Telerik Reporting fitted perfectly

"Telerik Reporting is an asset to any piece of management software. Our users can access real-time reports across multiple data sources anytime from anywhere in the world. The ability to create customized report objects while maintaining a generic delivery system was one of the key features that drew us to this product. Now we're able to give users their reports based on their user type and group permissions without hard-coding any WebForms."

You can read the full case studies following this link.

Telerik Reporting Q3 2007 SP1 is now online

Trayko Stoilov — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hello fellows,

I am happy to let you know that we have just released service pack one for Telerik Reporting Q3 2007.

The service pack contains some important fixes for issues found after releasing the Q3 version in mid December. It also brings on board some new enhancements related to the export to PDF feature, like support for fonts located in a TrueType Collection (.ttc) and support for font sub-set embedding when rendering to PDF.

Furthermore, we have managed to do some documentation corrections and additions to our online help.

The full list of the issues fixed in the SP1 for Telerik Reporting Q3 2007 you can see here.

Enjoy the coding

New features introduced in Telerik Reporting Q3 2007

Trayko Stoilov — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:00:00 GMT

You are working for X-Y-Z International which has 11 offices around the globe and your boss wants you to consolidate last year's expenditures of these offices in a single report. You already have the offices' reports in the DB, but some of them are in US Dollars, others are in Euro, and the rest are in Israeli Shekels. What to do!?

Hello Everyone,

My name is Trayko and I am with the reporting team in Telerik. This is my first blog and I am happy that it is related to something new and cool. For the past month we worked hard and spent countless hours on designing and developing the new Telerik Reporting version which we released just days ago.

In Q3 2007, which is fully compatible with the new VS2008, we are introducing several milestone features for you to play with. One of the features, a very important one for all Telerik customers, is full support for Cultures, Globalization and RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic, not only in HTML, but also in PDF and Excel. That is right - the reporting engine is Culture aware, allowing you to have mixed cultures in one and the same report.

This means that with Telerik Reporting Q3 2007 our imaginary friend from X-Y-Z International would not have to worry about consolidating report any more. Obviously, the easiest way to consolidate reports would be to print them, staple them together and let your boss do the thinking. But this is rather silly, isn't it?

What I would do instead is:
- Create one report for all offices using the Culture feature provided by Telerik Reporting;
- Export the report in nicely organized PDF, with charts for colorful visual representation of the values;
- Send it to my boss with a short memo;
- Export the report to Excel (another new feature in Telerik Reporting Q3 2007) and save the new file as a backup.

In addition to the cool features mentioned above, the new Q3 2007 version introduces a brilliant way to provide Dynamic Layouts. By using the docking and anchoring features, you will be able to create a table-like layout reports in minutes, without extra learning.

More information about the new features included in the latest version you can find here.

I dare you to try it - I am sure that you would appreciate the new features Telerik has added for you in the latest version of Telerik Reporting.