Fantastic Features Introduced with Telerik Reporting Q2 2013 SP1

The Telerik Reporting Q2 2013 SP1 release is now available for download.This release contains some great additions, some fixes, as well as some sought after enhancements.  In this blog post I’d like to highlight a couple features of this release, namely the enhanced graph interactivity as well as improved Entity Framework support.

ENHANCED GRAPH INTERACTIVITY

You may remember from our last webinar that Telerik Reporting introduced interactivity to the graph item. Interactivity was added to the graph through the ability to add actions to the category axis labels. Actions can do many things for us, like open sub reports, toggle visibility of report items, link to a webpage or jump to another location in the report. In SP1, Telerik Reporting has included the ability to add actions to the series of the graph as well. As an example, you can now implement the ability to open a secondary report (drillthrough) when a specific bar in your bar chart has been clicked.

In this case, clicking on the Bikes bar series navigates us to a separate details report. The detail report obtains the Bikes category as a parameter, and displays its subcategory sales.

IMPROVED ENTITY FRAMEWORK SUPPORT

Recently, we asked for your feedback in reviewing new Entity Framework Support in Telerik Reporting. The situation being that starting with Entity Framework version 4, Microsoft shifted from an ObjectContext based solution to a new DbContext solution. The previous EntityDataSource component provided by Telerik Reporting was dependent on having an ObjectContext available. While we could still work around this issue, we wanted to be able to provide better support for DbContext models. With SP1 we have officially released this enhanced support, and you are now able to use EntityDataSource with both ObjectContext and DbContext models. Please note if you are not using a code-first approach, you will need to include an additional constructor for design-time support. Simply find your DbContext class that was generated by EntityFramework and add a partial class with an additional constructor that takes in a connection string. In this example, I’ve added a constructor to my AdventureWorks.edmx model.

    public partial class AdventureWorksEntities

    {

        public AdventureWorksEntities(string connectionString)

            : base(connectionString)

        { }

    }

CONCLUSION

Download Telerik Reporting Q2 2013 SP1 today to take advantage of enhanced graph interactivity and the improved support for Entity Framework. We are also interested in hearing from you, feel free to submit feedback through our forums or support portal.

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