Where is Reporting in 15.1 Platform Installer? Do i really have to keep 14.2 Reporting alongside 15.1 WPF? If so, when is 15.1 Reporting due out?
Just finished a chat session with an Infragistics rep; bottom line: reporting as we know it is not, and will not, be in 15.1. However, the rep eluded to some announcement about this in a week, but couldn't give me details. So either its dead and they delayed telling anyone because A: "look at the shiny new 15.1 update so forget we gutted reporting" .. or B: they have a brand new secret reporting platform.
If its A then my company is screwed and we will be moving to Telerik and Kendo.
If it's B, then they should have announced it earlier, rather then after a big update that doesn't happen to have the reporting tool, thus making us panic a bit.
yeah i got a reply from Support that said it is not a product anymore. they said they will still be doing service releases for it, but since it didn't have one this round or last, i highly doubt that. last was October 2014.
Hi Guys,
In all honesty, our reporting product hasn't had an update in quite a while, last July we shipped an SR with about 20 bug fixes, but there hasn't been any new feature work for 4 releases (2 years), and we were going through the motions with releasing it while putting our efforts into a new, more modern reporting line.
I would urge you to check out ReportPlus as it stands today, and when we ship the desktop designer later this year and continue heavy investment in it over time, you will see more features, functionality and richness required for enterprise reporting. Even today, you have the ability to do a level of tabular reporting in ReportPlus - currently, you can do the most basic tabular views, in the future, you'll be able to template columns and customize the rendering. The biggest benefit is that you get reports on any device, in an interactive, touch-friendly, app. Along with that, you get HTML views, which you can basically embed anywhere you'd like.
We do understand that embedded tabular reports are still necessary, I would argue that when you start shipping reports that can be viewed on a smartphone, in a native app, your customers / users will be thrilled, especially at the management / executive level. Nobody wants to be tied down to a desktop app to get at data, everyone has a smartphone or tablet and the need to securely access data on devices is a #1 priority for enterprises today (read any article on top priorities for CxO's). Plus, with over 25 data connectors today in ReportPlus and more coming, the ease of which you can design and deploy reports far exceeds the effort needed in Visual Studio, which is far from ideal when trying to get to data sources like CRM, social feeds, Analysis Server and even basic data sources like Excel or Google.
With that, there is a still a 3 year support window for Infragistics Reporting, so it's not going away anytime soon, and your license is perpetual, so you can use it forever in your apps. It is not an easy to make these choices internally for us, but we are like every other company on the planet, we n# of resources to build great product, and need to ensure that we set customers up for future success. I'd rather be honest and open about our thinking and what's driving it vs. continuing to ship product that is not getting any love in terms of features, bug fixes, etc.
So where are we investing?
We also invest in technical resources to help you where you are at in your own time zones ... we have folks on the ground in Bangalore, Boise, Delhi, London, Tokyo, Sofia, New York / New Jersey, California, Montevideo ... so it's not just product. It's 24x5 technical support, solutions consultants, services and UX folks. Shipping product isn't just about a web based forum or chat for help, we recognize that sometimes you need to talk to human beings to get your job done.
If you have built a lot of reports, let me know what kind, send me screenshots, and we'll be able to figure out how this maps to our new reporting story. If you have reporting scenarios that we didn't meet in the past, let me know the scenarios and let's make sure we can hit them in the future.
I hope this gives you some insight, if you need any more info, feel free to email me at jasonb@infragistics.com I will be happy chat about anything,
Thanks,
Jason
so is ReportPlus for desktop going to then be included in Infragistics Professional ? Or do i have to spring for ReportPlus desktop in addition to what i already have?
Our current plan is to include R+ in Professional, but we haven't made any official announcements yet. In the next couple of months we'll finalize the packaging and I will let you all know.
Will we see an early preview so we can have a look and decide the way forward?
You can grab ReportPlus iOS form the App Store now and see both the viewer / design experience on iOS. For Desktop, we'll have a viewer experience (no report designer) in the summer timeframe and later in the year the Viewer + Designer experience.
How are you as a developer supposed to design the reports until then? Today I create *.igr files that the users can view and export to pdf/excel. I also use custom datasources (POC objects). Is that going to be possible with ReportPlus? Is there going to be a way to create reports based on existing *.igr files?