NetAdvantage Reporting 2011.2 SR 1 Notes

Miguel Machado / Friday, January 6, 2012

Below are the breaking changes, resolved issues, and update notes in the NetAdvantage Reporting 2011.2 SR 1.

Breaking Changes

Silverlight 5 support – NetAdvantage Reporting has been migrated to Silverlight 5, and Silverlight 4 is no longer supported.
Group Header and Group Footer sections behavior– both sections are now allowed to grow when necessary, e.g. a Group Header will increase its size when containing a table or a label with the CanGrow property set to True. Before this change, these sections never grew in size. When their content was larger than the size of the section, it was clipped.
Vector and Bitmap Printing in Silverlight 5 – Silverlight 4 introduced bitmap-based printing, which has great fidelity but experiences high memory consumption. Now, Silverlight 5 presents a Postscript-based vector printing, providing both a faster and remarkably less memory consuming printing mechanism. NetAdvantage Reporting allows you to choose among the following modes: forceBitmap, forceVector, and default mode. For details, see the Printing in Silverlight 5 section below.

Resolved Issues

Object Data Source TimeSpan issue fixed [Bug 96112] – when working with an Object Data Source which includes a TimeSpan field, the report is now correctly initialized and no longer throws an exception.
Object Data Source behavior in Report Data Explorer fixed [Bug 95781] – when creating an Object Data Source based on a class method which includes a type defined in another assembly, the Object Data Source is now properly expanded on the Report Data Explorer.

Update Notes

Update Release Notes – The new version of NetAdvantage Reporting is now available for download with the NetAdvantage Ultimate package here or as a separate product here.

In both cases, the process installs the last version of the product or upgrades a previous version to the new one.

Note: When installing NetAdvantage Ultimate 2011 Volume 2, if you have a previous version installed you have to remove the old MSI file located in the setups folder before downloading the new version.

Following there is a description of all the available printing modes:

ForceBitmap.

All pages are printed in Bitmap mode. This mode is slower and by far more memory consuming, but the entire pages are sent as a bitmap to the printer and this is the highest-fidelity approach for printing visuals when considering the equivalent of a print-screen.

ForceVector.

Only available when you have a Postscript-enabled printer driver; in this case all pages are printed in Vector mode. This is the fastest and less memory consuming mode, but it presents several issues detailed below.

Default.

This is a mixed mode and pages are printed in Vector mode whenever possible. Some pages, such as pages including images with transparency, are printed in Bitmap mode. This mode finds the right balance between speed, memory usage, and fidelity. That being said, it presents some issues with possible workarounds.

ForceVector printing issues.

PNG Images with transparency are printed with a white background.
Some printer drivers may throw an exception or Chart legends may not be visible. This seems to be a problem between Silverlight 5 and the driver. We are still investigating the issue.

Vector-based printing issue.

Labels and images with no border thickness and border color set to any color but Transparent show a slightly visible border when printed. This seems to be a Silverlight 5 bug, and there are two workarounds for the issue:

Set the BorderColor property to Transparent.
Print using ForceBitmap.

Working with printing modes.

The Silverlight object takes the infragisticsReportingPrintMethod parameter to specify the printing mode. When the parameter is not specified or does not have one of the two expected values detailed below, the default behavior (or mixed mode) takes place. Both, parameter name and parameter values are NOT case sensitive.

In XAML: