New Charts Types

New charts are emerged

• Horizontal Bar Chart
• Charts with more columns on Y Axis : comparative charts for Line, Bar and Horizontal Bar
• Stacked Bar Chart

Seeing the designer downloads is very useful.

Charts

Time to add charts to NextReports has come.

Similar to report, a new chart perspective is created. In here user will modify chart layout, which consists of four components : title, main, X Axis and Y Axis. Any component has a list of properties.

Charts can be previewed from NextReports designer. Default browser is opened with a flash object created from a json data file.

Charts can be published to a NextReports server where any user can add them to a a dashboard for viewing in real time.

NextReports - Image support

Designer v3.0 will add support to image rendering in HTML, EXCEL, PDF, RTF. A new Insert Image  action will be available in layout. Image will not be scaled.

Also NextReports Server will allow for adding report images . Download action will return a zip archive with '.report' file and image files if any.

NextReports - Metadata

Generated reports in HTML, EXCEL, PDF, RTF contain now metadata.

Every report has now a title (file name), author, subject, creator and keywords. From these you can see the NextReports Designer version, and the NextReports site link.

NextReports - Publish - revisited

Login Panel supports now not just to add, but also to edit and delete, a server. Also, the login for a specific server may be 'remembered'.

 

After a report is published  , name, server path and data source are also remembered, so a new publish update operation will be done faster.

NextReports - Publish

NextReports application allows for report publishing on a NextReports server. A NextReports server is a web application which manages data sources and reports and schedules reports to run at specific moments in time.

To publish a report , the user must know a NextReports server (ip and port) and must have a valid account on that server (user and password).

After the login the user is allowed to upload a report to server to a specific path.

The user is allowed to create folders on the server. Also , if the data source is not already on the server, the user can publish the current report data source.

The user can also download a report from the server making the work as easy as possible straight from the designer. You get your report from server , modify it and then put it back on the server, without accessing the NextReports web application .

NextReports - Column Size Revisited

Version 2.4 of NextReports will bring new features for resizing columns.

It is possible to select more columns headers and set the size for all of them with the mouse right click. The headers selection is done in the same way the cell selection is done :

• with CTRL pressed the user can select more individual headers
• with SHIFT pressed you can select all headers between two selections
• with the mouse you can drag and select automatically the headers.

A ruler can be seen in the layout if ‘Show ruler’ property is checked in the settings. The ruler unit can be centimeter or inch and is set also in the settings. Red markers will show the A4 width for portrait and landscape.

NextReports - Parameters with default values

From version 2.4 NextReports will have support for default values in parameters definition.


The ‘Default‘ tab contains the default values the parameter can take. Those values can be added by hand to a list (as in previous image) or can be taken from an sql source . If the parameter has default values, those values will be selected at runtime. If parameter is checked as hidden the parameter will not be seen at runtime, and it’s values will be computed and set at the moment the query is executed.

For example if you need a hidden parameter that is substituted at every run with the current date, you can edit the source with “select sysdate from dual” for Oracle datasource. For Derby database used as demo you may use "select current_date from sysibm.sysdummy1". The user does not have to know the format of the select for the connected data source. A template button in the dialog source does it automatically.