NextReports: Excel Sheet Name

When a report is generated as Excel, sheets are named as "Page1", "Page 2" and so on. This is hard coded till version 7.3.

But starting with 7.3 version a new 'excel sheet name' property is used to address this issue.

If this property is left empty, sheets will have names like 1, 2, 3, ....

If user wants to use it, he has three options:

1. Use a static list of strings: This is useful if you know from start how many sheets you have. For example A;B;C;D will name the first four sheets in this order as A, B, C, D.  If there are more sheets than elements in the list, next sheets will have their page number as name.
2. Use a template  marker for page number ${NO}. For example Page ${NO} will name the sheets as Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, ...
3. Use a template marker for group name ${G1}. This is useful if you have a group and you set "new page" after the group finishes, so you have group specific data on different sheets. In this case the sheets will be named with the group name. If there are more sheets than groups, next sheets will have their page number as name.

NextReports Evolution

Analyzing comparative data for previous and current year shows a strong positive evolution regarding the number of downloads (designer&server) and the number of updates (designer) made by users. Actual values are not displayed here, being sensitive data.

Number of updates has tripled in 2014 compared to 2013.

Number of downloads of all NextReports products has doubled this year compared to 2013.

This is very good news and I hope this trend will continue in following years.

NextReports: New lines in Excel

NextReports Engine can select text data which may contain 'new line' characters like \r , \n or \r\n. These are well interpreted if report is generated in PDF or RTF.  For Excel there was no posibillity until version 7.3.

If you have a character column with 'new line' characters, these will be replaced by Excel exporter. Exporter will also compute how many rows are present to know and to update the excel cell height accordingly.

Because this is a just a particular case, Excel exporter will not look to all texts for finding 'new line' characters. User has to select 'wrap text' cell property to true, to make searching active.

Table Widget: Rows per page

Table Widget is just a simple component used by NextReports Dashboards. As all other widgets, it has two common properties:

• Refresh Timeout - how many seconds must pass until an auto-refresh
• Timeout - maximum number of seconds must pass until the database query is executed (otherwise a timeout exception is raised)

Sometimes, a table widget may contain more data and pagination is used with a default of 100 rows per page. This not just helps with visualization, but it prevents OutOfMemory errors if someone is

ill-intentioned and adds a table with millions of records inside a dashboard.

In general tables used in dashboards should have a small number of rows, but in case you really need a table with many rows, you are able from version 7.3 to set a "Rows per page" property.

 

This value can be set between 5 and 100 allowing to have a different pagination if business requires.