Viewer for Silverlight

Comments

• AlexTZ

  July 2009 edited 4:57PM

  Hello,
  
  Silverlight is very actively being developed now. We'll wait when it becomes more stable and more functional. Maybe it will have built-in reporter in SL4 - who knows...
  
  At this moment (SL3):
  
  - Silverlight has no printing support - you can view the report, but not able to print it;
  - there is no c# scripting (CodeDom) - you can't use scripts in a report.
  
• Henk

  October 2009 edited 4:57PM

  Hi Alex,
  
  We are very happy customer using fastrecport for VCL. Because of customer demand for building web application we build all our new projects in Silverlight. We have been experimenting with ASP.net but we abandoned the technology because its to much dependent on java scripting issues. Silverlight give us at least, even more, the same look and feel as the "old" winforms appliction build with Delphi. The best benefits of Sl is that you have only 1-source code to maintain and not developing 2 codes for delphi and asp.net. I agree that SL lacks some necessary features for LOB application like printing. But definitely SL is very important for MS and it will gain a lot momentum also from component vendors. Parts of Office web app s being developed in SL and we have already out of the browser function for SL3. We hope that fast-report will be develop for SL when the required technical limitations are added by MS.
• AlexTZ

  October 2009 edited 4:57PM

  Hi Henk,
  
  We hope so too
• Xavi

  November 2009 edited November 2009

  Alex,
  
  Regarding "there is no c# scripting (CodeDom) - you can't use scripts in a report", yes I agree, but I think that the script could run in the server side, just like now the FR Web works. In fact, I think that most of Silverlight users only need a viewer. FR could offer a Web Service to provide one page each time to a Silverlight FR viewer control. This viewer, in the client side, only needs to render the data sent from the server. It is not FR in the client side like FR Winforms, it is just a simple viewer.
  
  I understand that FR has several renders: ASP, Winforms, pdf, Excel, ... Maybe you could add a new one for Silverlight.
  Silverlight does not have printing feature, but it is a question of time, I think that they are working on this since it is the most demanded feature in the SL forums. In any case, many applications do not need to print out the reports and a FR viewer for SL would match very well.
  
  By the way, using Silverlight, the drill-down feature, very complex in ASP, would be very simple, and additionally it could be dynamic, downloading more data according the demanding.
  
  I hope that you take it in consideration for your roadmap since Silverlight is gaining a lot of momentum for Line Of Business applications now.
  
  Thank you
• AlexTZ

  November 2009 edited November 2009

  Hello,
  
  The SL viewer is in our todo list. I cannot say when it will be ready, though. Its priority is not high.
• Xavi

  November 2009 edited 4:57PM

  Finally printing support for Silverligth is available in the new version 4. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee...28VS.96%29.aspx
  I hope that this helps in your decision to offer a SL viewer in a future.
  
  Silverlight 4 is consolidating its position as the natural choice for building business applications on the Web.
• AlexTZ

  November 2009 edited 4:57PM

  Hello,
  
  This "printing support" is not good:
  - it prints using the bitmap, so 1-page-job would be > 100Mb in the spooler (http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/t/146306.aspx);
  - no control over paper size, orientation, tray.