Over the years, a number of you have asked us to improve the manner in which we copy Grid and TreeList data - specifically, to maintain formatting so that data pasted into third-party programs will retain the formatting displayed within your app. With v15.2 and the introduction of Formatted Copy mode, you'll now retain full formatting whenever Grid and TreeList data is copied to the clipboard.

This new option simultaneously copies data to the clipboard  in XLS (Biff8), RTF, HTML, CSV and plain text (ANSI and Unicode) formats. As you'd expect, once pasted, the destination application will use the appropriate format.

Formatted Data mode will retain the following whenever data is copied to the clipboard:

• Appearance settings applied to the control and its individual columns.
• Appearance settings customized using dedicated events (custom draw events are not supported).
• Excel-style cell conditional formatting.

Both our WinForms/WPF Data Grid and Tree List controls include dedicated properties to customize clipboard operations. Copying data in plain text is enabled by default (to avoid breaking changes).  You can enable Formatted Data copy mode using the ClipboardMode option.

At present, the Data Grid only supports formatted data copy operations for standard Grid Views. We'll support other Views in future updates.

Earlier in 2015, we showed you a preview version of the Card View layout. However, this new Card layout was part of the DevExpress ASP.NET GridView control. As developed its features, we realized that this needs to be its own stand-alone control, so...

I'm happy to announce that in the v15.2 release, we have a new control: DevExpress ASP.NET CardView control (ASPxCardView):

The ASP.NET Card View control is packed with functionality and includes these great new features:

• Adaptive & Responsive
• Batch Editing & Updating
• Conditional Formatting
• Export to PDF, XLS, XLSX and RTF Formats
• Selected Records Export
• Large Database Support (Server Mode)
• Conditional Formatting Export
• Header Panel
• Total Summary
• Endless Paging
• Date Range Header Filter
• Filter Control
• Ellipsis with tooltips in cell texts
• Design-Time Card Layout Editor allows you to build a Microsoft Outlook inspired Contacts View with integrated data shaping and editing capabilities.

There's way too much to show about this control in just this blog post so be sure to sign up the upcoming webinar below.

Register for v15.2 webinar

To see all the new features coming out for the v15.2 release, sign up for the "v15.2: What's New for ASP.NET Developers":

Click here to register

Thanks!

In the v15.2 release of our ASP.NET Reporting controls, we have implemented a couple of really exciting must-have features!

Sub-reports

One of the things we’ve built is support for sub-reports. This allows you to embed (several) existing pre-made reports into a new report.

We have created a new control for this functionality which is the XRSubreport. You can drag it onto the design-surface in the Report Designer, double click it and start creating the new sub-report just the same way as designing the parent report.

When working with sub-reports, you will see a number of tabs below the report designer which allow you to switch between the various reports.

Once you’re finished creating a new sub-report, you will need to save the sub-report as separate definition on the web-server. For this we have added a Save (As) dialog:

Alternatively, you can also specify the Report Source URL in the object inspector of XRSubreport control if you want to use an existing report.

For the sub-reports features to work, we needed to change a couple of things in the reports storage mechanism. This requires you (the developer) to implement a report storage class so the reporting engine and designer are able to locate available sub-reports on the server for processing. This class is also used for saving new or modified report definitions on the server.

This reports storage class was already available on the WinForms counterpart where it is an optional feature. With the v15.2 release of the ASP.NET reporting suite, it has become something mandatory to implement. We will obviously provide you with a number of examples so you can use this new feature without problems!

Report Explorer

To improve the design experience as well as the productivity when designing reports, we have included a new feature; The Report Explorer.

The Report Explorer allows you to quickly navigate through different parts of your report, such as bands, styles and formatting rules. When selecting one of the nodes in the explorer, you will be able to delete it or modify it’s properties by clicking the appropriate button in the explorer.

The Report Explorer also gives you a quick and convenient way on creating new styles and formatting rules by selecting the styles node and next click the ‘+’ button.

By dragging a style of formatting rule from the explorer onto a control, this style or rule will be applied.

RichText support

We have redone the XRRichText control to fully support embedding RichText content (or database fields containing this) in your reports. It allows you to put either static, data-bound or content loaded from a file into your reports.

The XRRichText control also provides WYSIWYG rendering of RTF, HTML or plain text content in the Report Designer.

Register for v15.2 webinar

To see all the new features coming out for the v15.2 release, sign up for the "v15.2: What's New for ASP.NET Developers":

Click here to register

Let me know what you think of this upcoming reporting sweetness!

To make sure that you’re developing with the best feature rich controls in the market, we have added some popular (and most requested) features in the v15.2 release of the RichText Editor.

Tables

In this release we are happy to provide table support in the RichText Editor. For this, we have added some Office style features to create and modify tables inside your document.

Also styling tables and individual cells is done the Office way. We have added 2 “Contextual Ribbon Tabs” which will be shown when putting the cursor inside a table. These ribbons give you quick access to merging/splitting cells, deleting/adding rows and columns, and specifying other cell/table properties.

Mail Merge

In the current v15.1 release of the RichText Editor, we provided mail merging capabilities. In the v15.2 release we have taken it a step further by allowing you to visually select and insert auto-updated fields from a bound datasource:

You also have the possibility to switch between the live merged data and the field-codes by clicking the button in the ribbon:

Headers and Footers

Yes! We have support for headers and footers inside your documents! This includes insertion of different headers and footers on even and odd pages. A contextual tab in the Ribbon Control will be shown, enabling you to insert specific items like page numbers and counts in the header and footer.

Bookmarks

To navigate quickly back and forward through your document, you can now put bookmarks inside the document. These bookmarks can also be bound to hyperlinks.

Register for v15.2 webinar

To see all the new features coming out for the v15.2 release, sign up for the "v15.2: What's New for ASP.NET Developers":

Click here to register

Our upcoming release will include a new WPF TreeMap Control - a powerful way to visualize hierarchical or flat data using nested rectangles. If you are not familiar with TreeMaps and their possible use-cases, the following Wikipedia article provides a good background on TreeMaps.

Appearance and Behavior Customization

As you'd expect, our WPF TreeMap allows you to specify the layout algorithm used to arrange tree map items. The following options are supported out of the box.

Algorithm	Example
Slice and Dice
Squarified
Striped

Should your needs dictate a different layout algorithm, you can design derivatives as needed. 

With the use of Colorizers, you can specify TreeMap colors automatically. The list below includes all colorizers shipped with the Tree Map.

Colorizer	Example
Palette
Gradient
Group Gradient
Range

Just like layout algorithms, you can implement your custom colorizer when needed.

Finally, the TreeMap control supports interactivity features, such as selection, highlighting and tooltips.

Our upcoming release is going to include a number of key enhancements to our WPF Grid - the first of which is Inline Data Editing - something we first introduced in WinForms Grid a couple of years ago.

Inline Data Editing

As you can see in the screenshot below, inline editing is an alternative approach to editing column values within grid cells.

The Inline Data Edit Form can be displayed directly below the edited row or as a popup window.

By default, the Inline Edit Form is auto-generated based on column settings, but you can customize it as needed via options or completely redesign it using templates.

Partial Data Grouping

This release introduces partial data grouping within our WPF Grid Control. By setting a single option, group rows will only be displayed for rows with 2 or more matching values. As you would expect, this reduces the amount of scrolling/mouse clicks necessary to view information on-screen when grouped data is disparate.

Marquee Record Selection

This features gives users a quick and easy way to select a range of rows/cells.

Check out these great new features coming to the powerful DevExpress ASP.NET Spreadsheet in the next release, v15.2.

These features are available for both the ASP.NET WebForms and MVC versions of the Spreadsheet. The new features include:

Frozen Panes (Rows and Columns)

With an Excel inspired Freeze Panes feature, end-users can lock specific rows or columns in one area to keep this area of a worksheet visible while scrolling the worksheet content vertically or horizontally.

Data Validation

An Excel inspired data validation feature helps prevent end-users from entering invalid data into worksheet cells. This feature allows you to definie restrictions and provide notifications on what data can or should be entered in a cell:

Because it is difficult to see what validation is added to a cell, in the above image, we've added the green callout box images to highlight the validation in the spreadsheet cells. Those boxes are not part of the spreadspeet.

Table Sorting and Filtering

End-users can now use the Excel inspired AutoFilter feature to filter data by columns and to easily display only rows that meet specific conditions. Three filter types are available (depending upon the column data types): Text, Number, and Date Filters. In addition, the Filter by Values option can be used which allows you to select from column unique values.

Formula Bar

An Excel-like formula bar shows the contents of the current cell and allows creating and viewing formulas. To start creating a formula, click the mouse cursor in the formula bar and enter an equal sign (=).

Formula AutoComplete

The Formula AutoComplete feature makes it easier to create and edit formulas and minimizes typing and syntax errors. After typing an equal sign (=) and beginning letters into a cell, a dynamic drop-down list of valid functions that match the letters is displayed below the cell.

Document Autosave

The Autosave feature helps reduce the risk of data loss by saving an opened document automatically at predefined but customizable intervals. And you can programmatically handle:

• autosave operations: like saving to some other custom storage
• resolve multi-user conflicts (should any arise)

Work Session Hibernation

This feature helps you to save memory (RAM). When enabled, the 'work session hibernation' will automatically free server memory by hibernating inactive open documents in the spreadsheet.

If this feature is enabled, open documents which where idle for a certain time can be released from the server memory and saved to the server file system at a specific path. The hibernation settings (such as a session timeout, server directory) are available through an API exposed by the server DocumentManager object.

This hibernation feature helps if the server fails because when the server is restarted, the spreadsheet control will load the hibernated document and allow you to continue working.

Extended Page Setup Functionality

A new Page Setup dialog helps end-users prepare the document for printing. The dialog helps setup several print-related settings (such as document orientation, paper size, page margins, page order, etc.) and provides the capability to specify header and footer text too.

Ribbon Improvements

The built-in ribbon is improved by employing the ASPxRibbon control's newly implemented features, such as contextual tabs and one-line mode. Thus, the 'Design' ribbon context tab help with working with tables in a worksheet. One-line ribbon can be used to make navigation more compact within a control and make more room for document editing.

Register for v15.2 webinar

To see all the new features coming out for the v15.2 release, sign up for the "v15.2: What's New for ASP.NET Developers":

Click here to register

Thanks!

In our never-ending quest to make reporting easier (and more flexible) for developers and end-users alike, v15.2 will introduce a new WPF Grid-based report generation option. As you can see from the screenshot below, this new option gives your power users a way to customize output and hopefully go a long way to reducing the number of custom reports you'll have to create over the life of your app.

With just a few lines of code, you can invoke the DevExpress WPF Report Designer at runtime from the Grid Control and create reports based on its data.

To make things as easy as possible, we've added two behaviors that allow you to incorporate Grid-based report generation in your app when using our WPF Ribbon control:

• DevExpress.Xpf.Reports.UserDesigner.Extensions.ReportManagerBehavior
• DevExpress.Xpf.Reports.UserDesigner.Extensions.GridReportManagerService.

Here's how it works...first, attach the GridReportManagerService to a TableView:

xmlns:dxmvvm="http://schemas.devexpress.com/winfx/2008/xaml/mvvm"

...then attach ReportManagerBehavior to a Ribbon item and bind its Service property to GridReportManagerService:

DevExpress Dashboard v15.2 will ship with a completely redesigned client side data processing engine. This new data engine reduces memory consumption and improves the speed of client-side data shaping operations (grouping, sorting and aggregation) by loading a compressed snapshots of aggregated data into memory. As you'll read in a moment, the improvement in memory consumption/performance is significant thanks to the following techniques:

• Data compression is used to reduce memory consumption. For instance, dictionary compression is used to replace common dimension values with integer key values.
• The Dashboard's new data grouping algorithm uses hash tables (with integer key values obtained during data compression). The use of key values means data grouping and sort operations are executed much faster. 
• New multi-threading algorithms are used to perform independent operations. The Dashboard's data engine uses TPL (Task Parallel Library) to perform these operations.

We've also introduced strong typing for all operations within the data engine. This removes overhead expenses related to boxing/unboxing conversions.

Comparing v15.1 to v15.2

Seeing is believing and so here are a few test results that help illustrate the performance gains you'll find in DevExpress Dashboard v15.2.

Note: These results were gathered using Microsoft's Contoso Dataset and the underlying data source was formed using the following SQL requests:

select * from [dbo].[V_CustomerOrders] where ProductCategoryName = 'TV and Video'  | Returns approximately 1.2M records.

select * from [dbo].[V_CustomerOrders] | Returns approximately 12M records.

Memory Consumption

To say that v15.2 reduces memory consumption might be an understatement.

Binding/Loading

In this test, the Dashboard's List Box was bound to the ProductSubcategory dimension. As you can see below, we have a nearly 50x improvement from v15.1 to v15.2

In the test scenario below, the Dashboard's Grid was bound to the following dimensions and measures.

• Dimensions: ProductCategoryName, ProductSubcategory, Product
• Measures: Amount, Quantity (summary type set to Sum).
  

The power of the Dashboard's data processing engine speaks for itself - a 37x improvement in calculation speed. 

In this last example, we measured load times for the Dashboard's Pivot Grid (column/row values expanded at all levels).

Row Dimensions: ProductCategoryName, ProductSubcategory, Product
Column Dimensions: Region, CalendarYear
Measures: Amount, Quantity (summary type set to Sum)

Again, the results speak for themselves - calculation speed has improved 32x.

Though not a radical departure from Office 2013, v15.2 adds 3 new Office 2016 inspire themes to our WPF Theme collection:

Office 2016 Black | Office 2016 White | Office 2016 Colorful

In the following screenshot, we've applied the Office 2016 Colorful theme to our DevAV demo...

=====================================

If you've used our WinForms products in the past - and are moving to WPF - we'd love to hear from you...Is there a specific theme/skin you'd like to see us port from WinForms to WPF?

Well, you asked for it and we've delivered - Pivot Table support for our WinForms and WPF Spreadsheet.

With our v15.2 release, both the DevExpress WinForms and WPF Spreadsheet controls will include Pivot Table functionality so your users can analyze, categorize and summarize large volumes of data directly inside a worksheet. The control allows you to dynamically manage data source fields by using a Field List, to sort and filter Pivot Table items, expand and collapse detail levels, perform calculations on field values using built-in aggregate functions, apply formatting and more.

Once v15.2 is released, we'll be certain to blog about this feature in more detail.

Copy/Paste Enhancements

With v15.2, clipboard operations support BIFF8. You can now preserve cell formatting when data is pasted into a DevExpress Spreadsheet or Microsoft Excel.
The WinForms Spreadsheet control can now delay clipboard data rendering until data is requested.
The WinForms Spreadsheet now responds to any external changes made to the clipboard and automatically resets the copied cell range once the clipboard is cleared.

Set for release in v15.2 is clustering support for both our WinForms and WPF Map Controls. For those unfamiliar with this feature, its designed to aggregate map items and perform data density analysis.

Once shipped, the DevExpress Map Control will support 2 clustering algorithms:

• Distance Based: joins items - whose separation is smaller than a specified threshold - into a single cluster. The cluster's indicator is calculated as the mean of items.
• Marker: joins items - whose distance to the central item is smaller than a specified threshold - into a single cluster. The cluster indicator matches the central item.

You can also implement a custom clustering algorithm by inheriting from the MapClustererBase class (WPF) or implementing the IClusterer (WinForms) interface.

Groups

Predefined clusterers allow you to separate items into groups prior to clustering (for instance, to group items by attribute values before clustering).

It's relatively straightforward to implement this feature for our WPF Map Control - You simply assign the MapClustererGroupProviderBase class descendant object to the GroupProperty property:

If you're using the WinForms version of our Map Control, you would assign an object implementing the IClustererGroupProvider interface to the GroupProperty property:

Custom Indicators

As you'd expect, you can customize cluster indicators as needed (by using custom cluster item factories for WinForms or item settings for WPF).

To customize indicators for the WinForms Map Control, use the clusterer's SetClusterFactory(IClusterItemFactory) method to specify the factory used to generate cluster indicators:

For WPF, specify the required MapItemSetting class descendant object to the ClusterSettings property of the clusterer:

===========================

We'd love to get your feedback on this new Map Clustering feature. How likely are you to use it in your next WinForms or WPF project?

The v15.2 Rich Text Editor boasts some exciting new enhancements on both the WinForms and WPF platforms.   

Custom Draw via Layout API

One powerful feature coming soon is the ability to replace page elements. Using the Layout API, you can now draw lines, shapes and text above, below or in place of an element. For example, the image below demonstrates text drawn over an existing image, and blue rectangles in place of the text blocks.

Interacting with the document is achieved by subscribing to the RichEditControl.BeforePagePaint event and substituting the default Painter object with a customised descendant.

Nested Comments

With this release, we have added the ability for end-users to respond to comments inside a document, each reply is displayed in a conversational manner using groups making this a powerful collaboration tool.

Improved PDF Export

The engineering teams are always looking to increase performance where possible, and in v15.2 the PDF Export feature was targeted. You can see from the chart below that the exporting functionality is more that twice as fast, and uses 30% less memory.

===========================

As always, we would love to hear your feedback on the new features for the Rich Text Edit, and in particular the different use cases for the custom draw functionality.

Data visualisation is an important part of any application and in v15.2 we have extended our chart controls to provide 16 new financial indicators that are widely used by analysts around the world.

The DevExpress Stock Demo illustrates the type of complex trading system achievable by the WinForms and WPF libraries.

One of the key new features is the ability to plot several indicators in separate panes with individual axes assigned to themselves.

Lets take a look at some of the newly supported financial indicators:

Price Indicators are approximations of the average price for a period and can be used as a filter for moving average systems. In v15.2 the following price indicators are now supported:

• Median Price
• Typical Price
• Weighted Close

Oscillators in technical analysis are an indicator that varies over time within a value range specified by a centre line or min/max lines. Oscillators are used to discover short-term over bought or over sold conditions.  v15.2 now supports the following list of oscillators.

• Average True Range
• Commodity Channel Index
• Detrended Price Oscillator
• Moving Average Convergence Divergence
• Rate Of Change (Momentum)
• Relative Strength Index
• Chaikin’s Volatility
• Triple Exponential Moving Average (TriX)
• Williams %R

Trend Indicators attempt to provide an objective measure of the direction of a trend. Price data is smoothed and the trend is represented by a single line, like a moving average.

• Mass Index
• Standard Deviation
• Stochastic Indicator

Moving Averages provide an objective measure of trend direction by smoothing price data.

• Triple Exponential Moving Average (TEMA)

===========================

We would love to get your feedback on these new financial indicators. How likely are you to use it in your next WinForms or WPF project?

Those of you familiar with the Ribbon Control, originally created for the Microsoft Office® applications, might have come to the conclusion that this UI element is actually a pretty complex control with one simple design aspect in mind: “Show a lot of logical grouped actions without using a lot of real estate on screen”.

The DevExpress ASP.NET Ribbon Control already incorporates a lot of really nice features like Tabs and Galleries.

In the upcoming v15.2 release we have added two new features!

One Line Mode

This allows the Ribbon Control to save even more screen space by putting all actions on one line in the Ribbon. This also comes in quite handy in responsive web-pages, and still gives you access to the full action set in the control.

Context Tabs

This is a feature which allows you (the developer) to show Tabs with certain actions that are only applicable for the current feature the user is using. An excellent example of this is within the RichEditor: when the user moves the cursor inside a table, two new tabs with an accented background color are shown containing table-specific actions.

Register for v15.2 webinar

To see all the new features coming out for the v15.2 release, sign up for the "v15.2: What's New for ASP.NET Developers":

Click here to register

Our HTML5 team has been hard at work improving the DevExtreme HTML 5 Pivot Grid widget and with v15.2, we'll introduce the following new features/capabilities:

Excel Data Export

Once v15.2 is released, you'll be able to export Pivot Grid Data to an Excel Document. Data is exported as it's displayed inside the Pivot Grid - with sorting, filtering, cell formatting applied. As you'd expect, export operations will be executed on the client side.

Drill Downs

To help improve usability and facilitate data analysis, we've incorporated drill down support for our HTML5 Pivot Grid. You can now retrieve the list of records used to calculate a specific summary value.

Summary Level Calculations

If you've worked with pivot tables, you'll know that it's often more important to understand how a summary value correlates with other cells than it is to know the summary value itself. To that end, v15.2 allows you to choose the appropriate summary display mode from one of the following:

• “absoluteVariation”
• “percentVariation”
• “percentOfColumnTotal”
• “percentOfRowTotal”
• “percentOfColumnGrandTotal”
• “percentOfRowGrandTotal”
• “percentOfGrandTotal”
• If a predefined mode does not address your business requirements, you can implement your own summary calculation algorithm.
  

And yes, our Pivot Grid widget can now display in-group or cross-group running summaries.

Virtual Scrolling

When enabled, our new virtual scrolling mode divides all loaded data across multiple pages and draws only those visible. This improves performance when working with extremely large datasets. In addition, virtual scrolling allows you to load more than 5,000,000 Pivot Grid cells (the maximum number of loaded cells without virtual scrolling is 25,000).

Storing Pivot Grid State

In previous versions, if a user modified row, column, data field configurations or filter/sort conditions (etc) within the Pivot Grid, changes made by end users were lost when the widget was disposed. With this release, our HTML5 Pivot Grid widget can save its current state and therefore restore its last configuration.

Appearance and Layout Enhancements

You can now specify whether total and grand total cells are displayed prior to or after data rows/columns.

In addition, you can now hide grand totals or values for specified fields.

==========================

If you're using our HTML5 Pivot Grid or are considering it in your next project, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think of these new features.

As you all know, Microsoft Excel plays a significant role in business and so with our upcoming release, DevExpress Dashboard will introduce Microsoft Excel data export support. Simply said, you'll now be able to export the contents of the following Dashboard items to Excel.

• Charts
• Scatter Charts
• Grids
• Pie Charts
• Cards
• Gauges
• Pivot Tables
• Choropleth Map
• Geo Point Maps
• Range Filters

Here's an example of a Grid Dashboard Item with Sparklines exported to XLSx.

Note: DevExpress Dashboard preserves original data formats during export (Custom, Currency, Date, Time, etc).

It's painless to export data - simply select the Export to Excel menu item for the Dashboard Item you wish to export.

Binding to Microsoft Excel Workbooks and CSV Files

DevExpress Dashboard v15.2 allows you to load data from Microsoft Excel workbooks and CSV files. You can select everything in a worksheet or a cell range referenced by a defined table or name.

1. Select Microsoft Excel workbook / CSV file as  you data source type.
2. Locate the required workbook.
3. Specify import settings.
4. Select a worksheet, table or specified range.
   

Last week I announced the upcoming release of our WinForms and WPF Diagram Control. A "by-product" of our investments in a Diagram component is our new Toolbox Control. As you can see in the image below, it can be used as a "toolbox" but also offers unique UX options for those of you with complex navigation requirements.

And yes, I know, we have a number of navigation oriented controls and it can be hard to choose the right one - As mentioned before, if you do not need a toolbox but do need additional flexibility when building your app, the Toolbox Control might be the right choice for you. It ships with the following features:

• Multiple Item support
• Item Groups/Categories
• Search Box
• Ability to minimize the control.
• Quick access to item groups via a menu.
• Extended events for handling drag & drop operations.

I want to quickly elaborate on the last item...When it comes to drag & drop, the Toolbox Control includes:

We'd love to get your feedback on the new WinForms & WPF Toolbox Control. How likely are you use this in your next project?

v15.2 will bring with it a number of enhancements to our WPF Report Designer. Before I describe those, please note that though you are free to use this control inside your WPF projects, we have not yet officially released it. This product will remain a community tech preview once we ship v15.2.

Both a Report Wizard and Data Source Wizard are shipping in this release and work just like their WinForms counterparts: The Wizards allow you to select data source type (including our new Excel Data Source), specify connection settings, build a SQL query using the Query Builder, and in the case of the Report Wizard, specify settings for automatic report layout generation.

v15.2 also includes dedicated editors for complex report control properties. These include a Collection Editors, Formatting Rules Editor and Style Editor.

As you can see in the image below, the Report Explorer now displays Formatting Rules, Styles and non-visual components available in the open report.

A Group and Sort panel has also been added to the Report Designer. Just like its WinForms counterpart, the panel makes it easier to apply grouping and sorting rules to a report.

New Report Designer View

If you've used our WPF Report Designer, you'll be familiar with our classic designer view (ReportDesignerClassicView) pictured below.

v15.2 will introduce a new, modern web browser inspired view (ReportDesignerBrowserView).  This view is now used by default.

Finally, context menus are now available for all report controls. Context menus provide access to important settings and commands for all report controls and bands. For certain report controls, the context menu also includes an Edit… option, which invokes a dialog with complex setting options for the control (such as data binding settings, formatting, etc.)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a short blog about our upcoming Grid-based reporting solution for our WPF product line. As is always the case when we announce a new feature for a specific .NET platform, one of the questions on people's minds was whether the same capability will be introduced for WinForms. The good news is that yes, it will. 

Before I describe grid-based reporting for WinForms, let me give you a quick background..

Over the years, we've had great feedback on the grid's ability to print and render its contents (If you've used DevExpress WinForms controls in the past, you'll know that printing support is a long-standing feature). For many, this feature reduces the need to create pre-built custom reports, since end-users are able to customize the display of data within the Grid (sort, group, aggregate, add/remove columns) and then print/export the customized view. Though extremely popular, there has always been an Achilles heel to our Printing System - that being the ability to fully customize the output (be it to paper or exported to file).

Well, with our v15.2 release, we've taken ad-hoc grid-based reporting to a new level and given you a way to quickly create a report (both design and runtime), customize the report (or delegate customization to an end-user) and then send the report to a printer or export it to various formats with just a single button click.

 
This new report generation engine supports a variety of grid features, including grouping, sorting, filtering, data summaries, appearance settings, etc.

You can generate a report at design time by adding the ReportGenerator component from the Toolbox onto your form, and then selecting the Generate Report command from the component's smart tag.

 
The Report Generation Wizard that is invoked will allow you to...

• Select the Grid View against which to generate the report (only the standard Grid View is presently supported).
• Specify layout, grouping and appearance settings for the report (to simplify setup, changes are immediately reflected in the preview pane).
• Specify the report's title.

 
The new report is automatically added to the current project. You can then customize it using our award-winning Report Designer within the Visual Studio IDE.

 
The report designer allows you to...

• Preview, print and export the report
• Modify report element layout
• Modify report element appearance 
• Apply data grouping, sorting and filtering
• Add totals
• Add page numbers and system information;
  And so much more...

At runtime, you can either display the report's output within its print preview window or you can delegate report customization to end-users via the DevExpress End-User Report Designer. 

Note that you can generate a report in code -  with a single call to the GenerateReport static method...

And to generate the report using report generation options available in our Report Generation Wizard...

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We'd love to get your feedback on grid-based reporting. How likely are you to use this feature?