What’s New in Telerik Reporting and Telerik Report Server with R2 2021

Telerik Reporting R2 2021 brings Blazor Report Designer, support for .NET 6 latest preview and more. Telerik Report Server R2 2021 comes with enhanced Web Report Designer.

Mid-May is here, and the beautiful spring brings the next major version of Telerik’s take on the Reporting components and tools.

In addition to Blazor Report Designer and support for .NET 6 latest preview, the second release for the year also brings new enhancements in the Web Report Designer and Swiss Barcode support. Reports will get prettier with additional report content themes and will get embedded easier using the VS item template for .NET 5 web apps. To further improve the embedding experience, we added new themes for WPF Report Viewer. We also enabled customizing the listed export options to the end user per individual reports. And something else.

The Telerik Reporting R2 2021 and Telerik Report Server R2 2021 both benefit from the various new additions, so let’s take a closer look.

Blazor Report Designer

The Blazor technology is getting even more traction and we are proud that the Telerik UI for Blazor is one of the products advancing this technology. To provide complete Blazor integration capabilities, we started adding dedicated Blazor components for embedding the Reporting functionality into Blazor apps as well.

Up until now, we had a Blazor Report Viewer component for integrating report document preview functionality. Now we are proud to announce that you can also easily integrate the Web Report Designer functionality into these apps, enabling your trusted end users to create and edit report definitions. It is again a wrapper over the underlying HTML5-based report designer widget that exposes its APIs in the Blazor component so that devs can set it up easily using the VS goodies. It also significantly reduces the steps to add the designer by wrapping the necessary client-side resources.

Enhanced Web Designer

We continued putting a lot of care into the Web Report Designer, introducing changes that improve the user experience when adding new content to the report.

We implemented drag-and-drop behavior for the data fields from the Explorer tab to easily generate text boxes with appropriate expression to reference the dragged field and also to easily position and parent them on the reports surface. We also implemented such drag-and-drop behavior for the components from the Components tab to intuitively add them to the design surface. Don’t forget that you can also enable the Web Report Designer for the Report Server users as well.

Swiss Barcode Symbology

Following the barcode standardization trends, we are introducing a Swiss barcode symbology support based on the newly released Swiss QR-bill in payment slips. This enables you to generate documents conforming to the legal requirement in the respective countries.

This barcode standard gets supported from all of Telerik’s UI suites as well to provide seamless integration between our products. The new Swiss Barcode exposes a rich API, enabling simple setup of all required entities to make it easy for you, as a developer, to utilize.

This barcode is available for our Report Server users as well. Please do give it a try and provide any feedback in the comments below or in the dedicated feature request on our Feedback Portal.

New Report Content Themes

The report themes offered by our Band Report Wizard make it easier to have unified look and feel throughout the report boundaries. The themes available up until now covered standard Office themes only. Now we’ve added additional themes to choose from.

The new theme designs conform to the respective Kendo UI themes to make the report content blend with the app if that is a desired effect. Of course, you can always customize the report styles once the report gets created using the designer tools for editing the StyleSheet property of the report.

The new themes, which are also available when designing reports for the Report Server, are:

• Kendo Default
• Kendo Bootstrap
• Office 2019
• Blue Opal (now available for Band Report as well)

Give them a try and we would be happy to know what other themes you would enjoy having available. Use the comments below, please.

VS Item Template for Adding the HTML5 Report Viewer into .NET 5 Web Apps

It is always much easier to kickstart technology embedding by using a dedicated item template from our beloved Visual Studio. With this release, we introduce such a tool when embedding the Telerik Reporting product into a .NET 5 web application.

The dedicated VS Item Template will add the REST reports service implementation into your project or will set up the connection to a Report Server, depending on the choices made in the template’s wizard. It will also add all the client-side resources needed for the UI, along with a functional web page integrating the HTML5 Report Viewer.

Just choose the item template and the wizard will guide you to enter and select all the necessary settings. Easy, hm?

Apply Export Visibility and Settings Per Report

We had this quite popular request to enable hiding particular export options while the end users preview a certain report in the report viewer. The logical place for such a setting was the API of the report object itself, so we are introducing the RuntimeSettings property on the report object.

As the name implies, we decided to go further and, besides hiding an extension, it allows setting its export parameters and even changing its description that is listed to the end user. The property in question can be set up from the report designer tools as well.

The settings are respected when a report viewer lists the available export options. They will also be respected when previewing a report in all the report designers or in the Report Server. The export parameters will also be respected when the actual report export operation kicks in.

Two New WPF Report Viewer Themes

We are introducing dark variations of the Material theme and the VisualStudio2019 theme to the WPF Report Viewer to conform to our rich Telerik for WPF product and improve the reporting embedding into such applications. This way we are on par with the Telerik for WPF’s themes suite and have maximum flexibility to style your application.

.NET 6 Is Coming

And something else. Microsoft started releasing Preview versions of the next major .NET version 6. We followed to make sure our tools work on top of it, so we compiled our tools and demos for .NET 6 Preview. Now you can embed our tools if you plan to employ the new version of .NET in your future projects.

To support you, we have provided .NET 6 examples in the respective deployment folder. In order to open them, however, you would need to install .NET 6 SDK Preview 3 and Visual Studio 2019 Preview edition. For that reason, they are excluded from the Samples solution, so you need to include them on your own.

Fixes, Fixes, Fixes

As usual, we also addressed a significant number of issues found in the products along with some meaningful refactoring to keep our codebase fresh and clean. Here are some more important ones:

• Added support for single-file deployment of .NET Core apps that use Telerik Reporting engine.
• Fixed the incorrect DST offset for Report Server’s Scheduled Tasks and Data Alerts.
• Changing the Value of a Report Parameter in Web Report Designer no longer breaks the editor.
• Now able to select functions for chart fields in the Standalone Report Designer, where functions were marked "Undefined".
• The SVG images rendering now supports various line cap styles.

Change

As they say, the only constant is the change. As the technology evolves, we decided to stop the design-time integration of our Telerik Reporting product for Visual Studio 2010. Its extended support ended almost a year ago, so we decided it is time to move on. This is not to say you cannot compile your projects using VS 2010. However no report designer and its tooling would be available with this and the subsequent versions of our product. I hope this will not affect your development plans significantly.

Telerik and Kendo UI Community Forums Revamp

And last but not least, we revamped one of the favorite places that developers love hanging out—the Telerik and Kendo UI Community Forums. Check out the complete story of why and what in the dedicated blog post.

Webinar and Live Twitch Sessions

And don’t forget to join our live Telerik R2 2021 release webinar on May 19 at 11 am ET. We’ll also have Twitch sessions relevant to Reporting on Tuesday, 18, from 1:30 – 3:00 pm ET and Thursday, May 20, from 9:00 – 10:30 am ET.

Save Your Seat at the Productivity Tools Webinar

Learn More About the Newly Released Features in Telerik Reporting

For a full list of big fixes and new features, feel free to check out the complete release history, and don’t forget to share your feedback in the comments below or in the Feedback Portal.

Want to Try Telerik Reporting?

Telerik Reporting is a complete, easy-to-use and powerful .NET embedded reporting tool for web and desktop applications that support: Blazor, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, HTML5/JS, Angular, React, Vue, WPF, WinForms and UWP. Also available as a part of our Telerik DevCraft bundles, Reporting allows you to create, style, view, and export rich, interactive and reusable reports to attractively present analytical and any business data. Add reports to any business application through report viewer controls. Export the ready reports in more than 15 formats. Download a FREE trial today.

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