Improved Web Report Designer

With R2 2020, we’ve continued improving the Web Report Designer in Telerik Report Server. It enables developers to bring report editing functionality to their end users right from their web applications.

Let’s review the major enhancements in this release that drive feature parity with desktop report designers.

Graph item Wizard

The new Graph item Wizard enables easy setup of line, pie, area, bar and column charts without leaving the comfort of the Properties area. Configuring the Categories, Series and Values is done intuitively by dragging and dropping the corresponding fields.
 

Faster Backend

The Web Report Designer relies heavily on the type information served from the backend so that it can offer the editing capabilities for the Telerik.Reporting APIs. With this release we consolidated big chunks of requests, which makes the initial loading of the report designer much faster. The change is easily noticeable when using the full .NET framework service implementation where the report now loads up to 3x faster than before.

Overall UX

The overall User Experience is leveled up by multiple changes, fixes and refinements of the Properties area editors, additional commands and behaviors in the Report Explorer area. The Web Designer also got a loader to indicate if a task takes more than expected.

Newly Released Barcode Symbologies

With R2 2020, we enable the report authors who want to use the highly requested Data Matrix barcode symbology into their reports. We’re also introducing Planet and IntelligentMail symbologies, previously available in our Desktop control suites.

Ability to Freeze Table Header in Report Preview

In R2 2020, we enable the ability to freeze Table header rows or columns, similar to the feature in MS Excel, to improve the end user experience while examining generated report documents in preview.

Base64-encoded Images Support in PictureBox Item in Report Server

Nowadays, when it is all Web, Base64 encoded data is a common way of transferring and storing data, including images. We’ve covered this scenario by enabling Picture box and other image containers to be directly bound to a Base64-encoded string representing the image data.