New Features Demo ??

rbuser

Is there some a demo that Shows only the new features. Until now the only
thing that i found to see the new features is the small pdf on the site and
then start looking in the components.
It would be great to have a document with the new features and that also
mention then a demore where it can be seen in action. Certenally for the RAP
& DADE enhancements for editing SQL !

This could have been done better !!

(If i'm wrong and i overlooked something, i'm sorry in advance)

nicocizik

Hi Harry,

Thanks for the feedback. Nard posted a reply to the official announcement
that ReportBuilder 9 had been released that explains the new features in
much greater details. I posted the relevant sections of the article below.
As for a demo of the new features, we have had many requests for this but
have never done anything like it in the past. We will keep this in mind for
the next release. Feel free to download the Learning ReportBuilder
application if you would like to view and use the new designer features
without installing the trial version of RB 9.


Delphi 2005 Support
---------------------------
ReportBuilder 9 introduces Delphi 2005 support. Properly supporting Delphi
2005 is not a trivial task. Modifications to the code have been made to
support the Delphi 2005 IDE and to support modifications to the VCL. A
stable, professional, high performance release requires more work than a
successful compilation of the underlying source code. In addition all of the
online help (ReportBuilder, RAP, RB Server) has been converted from WinHelp
to HTML Help 2. Please browse our new help and enjoy - the creation of the
help system alone requires hundreds of man hours of work.

Support Services
-----------------------
ReportBuilder 9 includes Digital Metaphors continued technical support and
maintenance releases. Digital Metaphors engineers spend many hours each week
helping customers solve problems, creating examples, and patching code.


Designer Enhancements
---------------------

The Report Designer has been substantially improved, internally and
externally. The most requested and most powerful new feature is the addition
of multiple undo/redo support. This one feature raises the useability of the
product exponentially and will be enjoyed by every user. The new object
inspector provides a professional, attractive, and welcomed new interfaced
for editing component properties. Component properties are displayed in
carefully chosen categories. The workspace rendering technology has been
rewritten to improved performance and support the rendering of a the new
layout grid. The granularity of the grid is adjustable, snap-to-grid
functionality can be turned off and on. The rendering technology for
selecting, resizing, and dragging components has also been rewritten. The
performance of dragging multiple components is substantially improved.
Dragging and resizing operations are faster and smoother, flicker is
minimized. Objects rendered in the workspace have a clean new look as do the
selection and sizing handles. The toolbar and tool windows have been
re-architected. Visually you will notice the tool windows provide a more
professional look and improved docking performance.


Report Component Library (RCL) Enhancements
-------------------------------------------

The text based controls (Label, DBText, Variable, SystemVariable, and
DBCalc) have a new angle property that enables them to be rotated 360
degrees. Autosize and text alignment are both supported. We recieved
constant request for this feature from the developer community and constant
negative feedback that the freeware rotated label component did not work
properly and was unusable. A new border property for all basic controls
supports specifying whether a border is drawn, upon which sides of the
control the border appears, the color, pattern and line thickness of the
border. A new toolbar button on the format bar provides a convenient drop
down palette that can be used to control the border appearance. A new
Anchors property enables a control to reposition itself in response to the
change in height and width of its parent (band or region). For example, a
control that is anchored to the right edge of the page can reposition itself
if the paper width changes or the orientation changes from portrait to
landscape. A control that is anchored to the bottom of a band can reposition
itself when the band height changes. This is supported at design-time and
run-time. A new toolbar button on the format bar provides quick access to a
drop down palette for visually specifying anchors. The new PageBreak control
provides control over pagination. The control can either be positioned in
the z-order amongst static sized controls, or can be assigned a
ShiftRelative relationship with dynamic stretching controls such as
subreports or memos. One of the most requested features was to enhance the
RichText mail merge support. The RichText editor has a new tool panel that
appears on the right side. The datapipelines and fields are displayed in a
treeview allowing for easy selection of fields from all available data
sources. Selecting a field displays a set of display formats appropriate for
the field datatype. Custom formats can also be added. Simply click the Add
Field button to insert the merge tag into the text. Internally the
architecture for the component design-time controls and the component popup
menus has been completely re-architected to provide separation of the
design-time related code and the report engine code. This means that
applications that do include the end-user designer will no longer be linking
in component design-time code that is never used. The component design
controls and popup menus are now registered as separate entities. This
enables you, for example, to create a custom popup menu and register it to
replace the default popup menu associated with a specified component class.
New report level events have been added to enabled better control over
parameter initialized, custom ask at runtime support, dynamic sql generation
and the ability to cancel a report after displaying a custom dialog.


Report Output Enhancements
---------------------------
PDF export has become a core feature requested and demanded by our customer
base. ReportBuilder 9 adds built-in support for PDF. Support for the new
text rotation and border features has been added to all applicable output
formats.


Data Access Enhancements
----------------------
The datapipelines now support GUID field types and provide support for GUID
data linking. A new Guid Collation type has been added to the linking
functionality. Guid Collation Types for SQL Server, MS Access, GUID, and
String based collations are supported.

Report Engine Enhancements
--------------------------
The report engine has been enhanced to support calculations that are
performed in the Footer band and to automatically detect invalid layouts
that result in infinite page generation. These are two of the most frequent
tech support issues and enhancements requested by customers. In addition,
most of the RCL enhancements require the report engine to be modified.

DADE Enhancements
-----------------
The DataSetting dialog has been re-orgainzed to include a Connection and SQL
tab. Support for GUID data field linking has been added. A new SQLBuilder
class has been added to provide a simple intuitive run-time interface for
performing dynamic SQL manipulation. The SQLBuilder is documented in the
online help file. The 4,000 lines of new source code that comprise the
SQLBuilder class and its helper classes reside in daSQLBuilder.pas. Here is
an example of using the SQLBuilder:


lSQLBuilder := TdaSQLBuilder.Create(Report.DataPipeline);

lSQLBuilder.Clear;
lSQLBuilder.SelectTables.Add('Customer');
lSQLBuilder.SelectFields.AddAllFields;
lSQLBuilder.SearchFields.AddAutoSearch('Customer', 'Company', 'Like',
'S');

lSQLBuilder.Free;


RAP Enhancements
----------------
The most frequent requests for improving RAP are all related to initializing
the report by preparing parameters, displaying custom dialogs, dynamically
modifying SQL, and optionally cancelling a report from RAP code. All of
these tasks can be elegantly handled via RAP by utilizing the new Report
level events and the new SQLBuilder class.


EndUser Guide Enhancements
--------------------------
A new Learning to RAP Guide is now available. It contains a set of tutorials
designed to teach end-users how to use RAP to perform calculations and
dynamically control visual aspects of the report while it is generating.
Both the Learning ReportBuilder and Learning to RAP applications have been
compiled using ReportBuilder 9 and thus incorporate all of the latest
features.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Nico,

Thx, but in the announcements newsgroup is see no reply with attachment.
Ok, i suppose that the text you added is that mentioned reply.

Thx, again.