Generally, I think the Reporting product is going in the right direction - faster, easier report generation and flexible -- but using the Reporting product feels like it's missing alot, perhaps because it is a "preview".
It would be nice also for the preview if there would be fixes made to some of the issues before the 11.1 release.
It would also be nice to know how much more the "real" version would offer.
Hi George,
Thanks for your feedback.
We are very excited about the Reporting product. As in any V1 product, we needed to pick our battles. It was going to be difficult to be able to complete with other offerings feature-wise, as most of the existing products were in the market form 3-8 years. We picked some key scenario that did not have good solutions in the market today, like being able to render reports entirely in the client. This is very important in particular in modern applications where the data is available in the client and you don’t want to spend server CPU cycles to render reports, because servers are usually under heavy load or are paid per usage.
One key investment was creating a design-time experience from scratch, without relying in the Windows Forms designer. This will enable us to host the designer in Silverlight, so power users could customize the report layout. This is not a V1 scenario for us, but is a very important part in our product strategy.
We plan to have interim releases between the CTP and the final product release. The next interim release will have support for exporting to Excel and printing for WPF and Silverlight, in addition to several usability and bug fixes.
Regards,
Andres
Hi,
I was able to test this product (as much as you can at this point) and was impressed with the design and its ability to use data entities. I was excited about the ability to use this product in both the windows and ASP .net environments (develop once for all environments!) .. There are dozens of reports base level reports that this could be used as part of an application. The concept of client side running was also exciting.
Unfortunately, most of the development is in Silverlight environment which microsoft appears to be pulling the plug on (not to mention the lack of potability). While I personally like the Silverlight environment, it does not have much traction in the market.
I would like to see more ASP .net linkage (and samples) and was wondering how it will work in the new html 5.0 environments. Maybe seeing an report interface sample that works with routing and can consume metadata tags to alter how a report runs (parameters through metadata tags).
PS: I love the PDF through put, but would love to see it come up in the reader automatically (Maybe I missed that option).
Anyway, it is an exciting tool and I will be watching closely to see were it goes.
Thanks
Ken
Hi Ken,
Thanks for your comments.
Without getting into discussion about SL/HTML, which has been discussed too much lately ;), I'd say that WPF/SL will continue to be an important platform for internal Windows applications, which is where most of the Reporting activity happens. That said, HTML5 is a very important platform for Infragistics so it's very likely that we'll have support for it in future versions.
PDF exporting is just that, creating the PDF. We could add an option to start Acrobat Reader after exporting. We'll add it to our list.
Thanks,