At the first look the NetAdvantage reporting looks great, but I have to mention several points. Some points may be possible right now (in this case a hint in the right direction would be nice). Other points should be included in a future release.
Code behind & customizing parameter validationYou wrote that code behind don't fit into your understanding of a flexible reporting solution. Code behind would prevent storing report definitions in a database. Please think about an assembly that you could embed in the report definition or store the assembly in the database also. In that way I could imaging of customizing the parameter validation rules.
Merging reportsPlease integrate the possibility to merge several reports into one big report. It should be possible to define the merge order and so on.
Import various file formats As far as I know you can import png and jpg files only. In order to provide the best visual results I would to appreciate the usage of vector formats (e.g. wmf or wpf path-objects).In addition we need a way to combine reports with existing pdf files in order to get a pdf file with the combined content.
Conditional formattingYou said already that conditional formatting is coming in a future release. This feature is very import for us!
Rendering with silverlight controlsYou wrote:
"Silverlight controls can be used for rendering parts of the report, which usually provide a much better visual design and interactivity."
Does the CTP provide this feature already?
User customizationsIs there a way to access the underlying report objects? I would like to display the report structure in order to give users the ability to (re)move report parts.
Hi Joerg,
Thanks a lot for your feedback. Answers below:
Code behind & customizing parameter validationWe'll try to not to do code-behind as much as we can ;). We could do parameter validation without code-behind, in a way that's similar to what we do with runtime datasource customization, or perhaps with something like DataAnnotations. Are the specific scenarios you are thinking of?
Merging reports
This is in our list but not for V1.
Support various file formats
I see the need for adding support for those formats. We'll add it to our list. WMF is not trivial as Silverlight does not support it, but we could write a converter. Would XAML-based images be enough?
Conditional formatting
Yes, this won't be in the next CTP but it will be in V1.
Rendering with silverlight controls
Yes and no ;). We are using SL controls for rendering, mainly our chart control. For V1 we won't have a way to let you add your own controls, but it's something we'd enable in future releases.
User customizations
It's something our current architecture support, but it won't be documented or have specific testing around usage scenarios for v1. End-user customization is a very important scenario for us, and we can host the report designer in SL or WPF, but we decided to focus in core reporting features for V1 and leave that for future releases.
Lookups
We won't have that in V1. You can solve it by binding to a collection and adding properties that do the lookups.
Formatted Text
We won't have that in V1, but it's a feature that has been requested a lot.
Regards,
Andres
Code behind & customizing parameter validationThe easiest scenario would be to limit the number of possible characters. This is a fairly simple example. Maybe the usage of regular expressions would be a first step regarding parameter validation. And it shouldn't be very complicated to implement for you in V1. In many cases we could provide the user interface and the validation routines before pop up the report. But with regular expression you could cover a lot of requirements with little efforts.
Merging reportsMust have for v2 ;)
Support various file formatsXAML-based images would be sufficient and a high gain in image quality. Please try to integrate that feature in v1. Another formats like Adobe Illustrator could be imported through Microsoft Expression Blend.
kind regards!