We are proud to announce the immediate availability of DevExpress VCL Subscription v19.1, our suite of controls for building Windows apps with RAD Studio, using either Delphi or C++Builder. This release ships with numerous new features including:
- Right-to-Left layout support for Ribbon, Pivot Grid, Vertical Grid, Menus, and Wizard
- Excel-Inspired Filtering UI in Grid, TreeList, and Vertical Grid
- Office 2019 Ribbon Style
- Major updates to the Flow Chart Control
- New Office 2019 Vector Skin
- PDF Viewer: Attachment and Text Markup Annotations
To celebrate this release, I presented a webinar yesterday to show off all this and more. If you missed it live, it’s now available on YouTube.
At the end of the webinar we had a Q&A session, some questions being ably answered by the team in the background (Thanks, guys!), and some more clumsily by me. I repeat here what I said at the time: if you have a suggestion, please let us know by writing to support@devexpress.com. We appreciate getting feedback that can help us make better features and enhancements. Also, of course, by doing so you can more easily track our progress on your suggestions.
I’ve edited and listed the questions and answers here:
Q: Does the new [Excel-inspired] filtering appear automatically after re-building?
A: To turn on the new filtering UI, use the dxDefaultFilterPopupWindowMode global constant in the source code to make it active for all Grid, TreeList, and Vertical Grid controls. Or you can use the option that’s available for individual controls.
Q: Is there any possibility to add our own custom date ranges? I deal a lot with schools and would like to add an option for semesters or school years (which may begin on September 1 rather than January 1 for example).
A: Adding custom date ranges is not available at the moment. Great idea, so it is certainly worth adding a suggestion via our support center.
Q: Was hi-DPI support enhanced for themes that do not use SVG?
A: Only SVG-based ones in v19.1, others are scheduled for v19.2.
Q: With regard to your Cloud Access components, such as file access for OneDrive and Google Drive, I would like to see support added for Dropbox. (Several people asked for this.)
A: Great suggestion, please write to support@devexpress.com to notify us, and to be able to track it.
Q: Any possibility of (better / more beautiful) data visualization / charts for VCL? (Several people asked the same.)
A: A good question, one that we have discussed internally in the past and indeed do so for every release. Currently our charting features are part and parcel of our data grid, and (fairly obviously, I guess) we have an internal port where we’ve separated them. The issue then becomes one we’d have to discuss with Embarcadero since TeeChart is provided as part of the RAD Studio install.
Q: With the FlowChart control, is there an OnClick event and/or drill-down capability for the shapes within a flowchart?
A: An interesting idea, but we’d need more details on what you are trying to achieve. Please email support@devexpress.com.
…And of course, there were several variations on this last question…
Q: Any news about FMX support?
A: In essence, we have nothing concrete to announce as yet. Certainly we are working on controls for FireMonkey, mainly the data grid (this now supports master-detail, has editors for text, memo, dates, checkboxes, and supports record navigation, insertion, deletion). The issue is, as we have repeatedly discovered, FMX does not have a lot of the low-level support for UI control management that we have in VCL. Hence, we either wait for it to appear, or fudge some kind of fix. All that takes more time than we’d like.