Development Roadmap for FastReports.Net ?

NeilG

Having been a VCL user a couple of years ago, we are now looking at a suitable Reporting Engine which will provide both Web based and Winforms based solution.

We have noticed are there are some differences in the overall functionality (as expected). What we are particularly interested in is whether there will be support for the following in the Asp.Net WebViewer
a. Barcodes
b. Charts
c. Ability to natively print, instead of PDF

Given the pace of a 1.0 to 1.1 release, is there any development roadmap for functionality to be added in FastReports.Net over the next 6-9 months (our timetable for delivery).

If there are any plans for Silverlight viewers etc etc, can these be shared - as they will greatly assist with our decision making (and I am sure others).

Thanks

Neil

AlexTZ

Hello,

1) Barcodes and Charts work well in both Windows and Web mode. Probably you miss something.

2) WebReport can print only to PDF. There is no option to print directly to selected printer, like in WinForms. Possible ways to print from asp.net application:

- print to printer that is accessible to the machine that hosts your asp.net application (server). It can be a network printer, not your local printer. FR does not support that;
- display the report as HTML in the separate browser window and print using browser. In this case, you may get incorrect results because the browser handles printing. FR does not support that, but it is in our todo;
- export to PDF and print using Acrobat. This is most accurate way - we support that.
- install some kind of ActiveX on client machines and run it to print a report. This way is used in the Microsoft Reporting Services, but it work ONLY with IE. We don't plan to support that.

3) In the next versions, we will focus on Web features like dialogue forms, interactive reports, printing via web-browser. Also we plan to improve existing export filters and create new (native export to Office2007). Any WPF/Silverlight solutions are not in our todo list for now.

pinbot

I'm glad to see you will be focusing on the web reporting!

2 things I'd really like:

1. Interactive.
2. Being able to "maximize" the report to fit the browser window.

Also, the native export to office 2007 sounds great.

Exporting to Excel now displays a warning that the file type does not match the data. I had to set the file extension to ".xls" to force the browser to open with excel, even though it is actually a .xml file.

Office 2007 can open .xml extension files but people with office 2003 just see the .xml data in the browser window.