NextReports 9 : Creating a server color theme

NextReports 9 changed the UI by adopting bootstrap and less css preprocessor.  This means the old way of adding a new theme is now obsolete.

To make a new theme for NextReports Server you will have to know the following:

- there is a themes folder with 3 defined folders from start : green, red, blue
- you must create a new theme folder which is similar with red or blue theme folder (the entire structure)
- inside images folder you must put your logo image for the specific theme
- inside less folder you have style.less identical with that from red or blue
- the color changes are taken inside variable.less file

Here you can look for all colors, but the important ones are:

// Theme Colors
@main-color:                     #FF5722;
@main-light-color:            #FFDDD3;
@main-lightest-color:       #FFEFE9;
@main-lightest-bg-color:  #faf8f7;
@main-dark-color:            #DF4C1E;
@main-darkest-color:        #A03715;
@secondary-color:             #4D433F;
@secondary-light-color:    #E6D9D5;
@secondary-dark-color:    #332C2A;
@body-color:                      #edecec;

You can use an editor like brackets . The advantage is that you need to compile less files to obtain the final style.css. And 'brackets' editor can be set to compile a less file when you 'save' it (LESS Autocompile extension), which is very handy. You practically modify variable.less file and save / compile it. Then you save / compile style.less which will generate your style.css file.

All i18n files must contain a new property called:   Settings.personalize.theme.<color>=<name of theme>

NextReports Server: See your refresh time

Any widget inside a NextReports Server  dashboard can have a refresh time. By default this is zero and no refresh is done. If it is set to a bigger value, then after the specified number of seconds the widget is auto refreshed.

Sometimes, if a dashboard has many widgets, you may want to find which of them have a refresh > 0. From version 9.0 this will be easily possible because widget's header will contain the actual refresh time if any:

The time is nicely show in hours, minutes and seconds (if any):

NextReports 9: A New Header Menu

Before NextReports 9 a Tab Menu was used to show all the features. Because this was not scalable and increasing number of tabs made the application UI looked a bit ugly when a tab or more were falling to next row, NextReports 9 will use a new header menu which will contain all the sections.

By default more space can be used by server UI because there are no tabs anymore:

When user clicks the menu button from top left, the menu will slide from left to right showing available sections:

Actions from top right like 'Change password' and  'Log out' where grouped to a top right actions menu:

Santa is working hard ...

NextReports Server will have a new user interface and Santa is working very hard to it.

The new UI uses Bootstrap and brings many improvements in how the entire layout is created and shown to users.

The themes were redesigned and now they are applied also to the Login page:

The tabs were replaced with a vertical menu offering now more space and allowing for scalability (number of tabs was big enough to go to second row and creating an ugly effect). You can take a look at some screenshots:

Because changing the UI was a big step it wasn't time to release a new version of NextReports this year. So, instead of an awaited 8.3, a new version 9.0 will be released in January.

Merry Christmas and  A Happy New Year to all NextReports users!

NextReports Server: More Settings

NextReports 8.3 will add a lot of new settings for users.

Inside Application Settings a new "Distribution" set is found. This groups all email settings and two new:

• Distributor Date Pattern
• Distributor Time Pattern

These patterns are used by generated report files if ${date} and ${time} are used inside their names.

"General"  section will have new properties like:

• Polling interval (s) : number of seconds after a poll is done (to show messages to users)
• Upload Size (MB) : maximum size of a file that can be upload to server (in previous version it was 1MB and it was not configurable)

Data Source definition will contain two new properties for connections pool:

• Increment connections number (if pool is full a number of new connections will be created inside it)
• Idle connection time (time a connection can stay inside pool if it is idle)

Any table widget will have a new property called : "Enable filters".

If this is checked, then a row with filters will be seen:

These are just a few properties that will increase the level of configuration inside NextReports Server.