Perpetuum Technical Blog

Perpetuum Software Team congratulates everyone on the long-awaited spring!

Spring is time of changes and updates. Asking ourselves what we can do to facilitate and increase the effectiveness of the components work we concluded that it would be great if our clients had advanced PDF export abilities.

Now, we are glad to announce that we are about to finish the work over a new PDF export filter. In this post I won’t go deeply in describing advantages of exporting reports to PDF since there are a lot of articles on this theme in the Internet. I just want to summarize all our clients’ words about the necessity to use PDF export filter: “We need convenient and easy-to-use means to quickly deliver reports to our customers. And our customers, in their turn, should be able to work with these reports.”

So, all mentioned above lead us to the idea to re-write PDF export filter. And we did it…

A new PDF export filter includes advanced abilities of exporting documents to PDF.
• First of all, text view after export is improved. It doesn’t matter that the text size doesn’t fit the TextBox it will be correctly output on the page if you use the TextBox.StringTrimming property.
• Secondly, a new PDF export filter allows the optimization of the size of exported documents. PDF documents often have big size because of images. Now, you can set image quality to decrease the document size.
• Thirdly, we amplified PDF export filter functionality. We improved support for extended character set symbols and custom characters. This will considerably increase your abilities and options when exporting to PDF.
• Fourthly, we added support for encrypting. This will give you the opportunity to protect your documents from modifying and your work from redistributing.
• And finally, we made it possible to export bookmarks, text, and background fill. This will keep report quality and provide better visualization of the information.

A new PDF export filter will be included in a new release of Report Sharp-Shooter. It is expected in April, 2010. But we are still open for any your ideas and suggestions on how to improve PDF export features at our forum.

The beginning of the year was marked for Perpetuum Software with hard work on a
new release of Silverlight Viewer for Reporting Services 2008.

Planning the release, first of all we take into consideration requests and suggestions of our clients. And now we are glad to announce that the release is almost ready to see the world.

We finished the work on errors handling. At first sight this functionality doesn’t seem to be essential. But when it comes to work with the component and getting errors this functionality becomes very important. It saves time on looking for the reason of the error and eliminates the clients and our technical support staff headache. The possibility to record errors to the log file on server will be available. To make this feature more user-friendly we will create an option that will allow switching on/off recording. On the clients side the error will be visualized. It will provide possibility to the developer to see and solve the problem himself or to send it to our technical support team.

Getting Started documentation and Getting Started example are reviewed. Examining the troubles of our customers we found out that there are some problems connected with the clients hosting. Modifying the example we tried to cover all these problems to make the use of our product independent from the hosting type.

But everything appeared to be not as perfect as we expected. Unfortunately, we failed to include the local report server support in this release due to some peculiarities of beta release of Visual Studio 2010. But we strongly hope that the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will make it possible to implement this feature into our product.

The final release of Silverlight Viewer for Reporting Services is expected at the end of February, 2010.

Be that as it may, we are not going to stop there and planning to release the next version in April 2010. You can see roadmap on this version on our Perpetuum Software website.

And we are still waiting for your suggestions and feature requests on Silverlight Viewer for Reporting Services at sales@perpetuumsoft.com.

Our aim is your comfortable and successful work!