NextReports 'Hide when expression' property

NextReports Designer version 3.3 will add a new important feature to its core engine. A new property called 'hide when expression' can be set for every layout cell .

What does this mean?

This property contains an expression. If expression is evaluated to true at runtime, the cell content will be empty in the resulting exported report file. Also, if all cells from a row have 'hide when expression' property set and all those expressions are evaluated as true, the entire row will be hidden.

Example

Lets show an example with default Timesheet report.

You can see detail row D1 with some expressions. $E{WorkHours} expression  represents the work hours from column $C{Hours} and it is defined like this :

All other expressions are similar testing the corresponding activity code.

Because we do not want those expressions to be shown at runtime, we will set 'hide when expression' property for the containing cells. In this case, the expression is one which will always be true :

All cells from D1 row are always hidden, so the entire row will be hidden. That is why there is no need to set other properties for those cells like color, font and so on.

Expressions are used in some functions which can be seen in footer rows. For example, the total work hours is a function created on $E{WorkHours} expression :

 In this way we can have a more detailed report as seen in following results :

NextReports Server 2.3

Forthcoming NextReports Server version will bring some new features regarding dashboards :

• Any widget (chart/table) from dashboard can be detached, resulting a popup frame which can be maximized to full screen (with F11 key) . This will allow to view a chart on a plasma.

• There is a new action 'Go to entity' which will redirect the user to the chart / report used by a widget. This will offer an easy way to update or to do any supported action for that entity.

• Widgets have now an auto-refresh time (in seconds) property which can be modified from settings action (0 means no automatic refresh). This property will also be used inside a widget detached popup frame (instead the general "update interval" property defined in application settings)

Also, from this version, user is allowed to manually enter multiple values for parameters. Previous versions allowed only for manual single insertion (from a text field, calendar and so on) .

You can view these features in Online Demo version. ( demo / demo  )