Royal TPG Post KIX 4-State barcode can now be used in Stimulsoft Reports

We are working on extending the amount of bar-codes which can be used in our products. Royal TPG Post KIX 4-State barcode is the next one we support in
Stimulsoft Reports product line. This symbology is used by Royal Dutch TPG Post (Netherlands) for Postal code and automatic mail sorting. It provides
information about the address of the receiver. This symbology encodes alpha-numeric characters (0-9, A-Z). The barcode is also known as Royal TNT Post
Kix, Dutch KIX 4-State Barcode, Kix Barcode, TPG KIX, Klantenindex Barcode, TPGPOST KIX.
In the prerelease build of the product from November 16, 2010 this feature is already included and available for evaluation.
You may download the prerelease build here .

The Chart component is added in Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight. It is possible to show graphs in reports

Graphical representation of data is now possible in Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight. We added the Chart component that is used to create and output graphs
in a report page. The following types of charts are available: Column Area, Bar Area, Pie Area, Line Area, Area, Gantt Area, Spline, Spline Area, Scatter Area.
Each chart type has numerous properties which allow you to customize a chart according to your requirements.
In the prerelease build of the product from November 16, 2010 this feature is already included and available for evaluation.
You may download the prerelease build here .

New videos on our site

In the Video section of our sute a new section with reels, showing step by step instructions of designing various types of reports, is added. 25 new lessons will help you quickly
understand how to work with products. This section will be useful for both novice and experienced users. These videos can be found in the
Step-by-step tutorials section. They are sorted from simple ones to complex. You will be surprised that it is so easy to create reports!

New themes in Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight.

New themes in Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight. In the first official release of the software only one theme was available. This was
Office 2010 Blue. Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight expands the list of supported topics. To the existing one four new ones are added:
Office 2007 Blue, Office 2007 Silver, Office 2010 Black, Office 2010 Silver. In the prerelease build of the product from
November 3, 2010 this feature is already included and available for evaluation. You may download the prerelease build
here .

New themes in Stimulsoft Reports.Net.

New themes in Stimulsoft Reports.Net. Stimulsoft Reports.Net expands the list of supported themes. To the existing themes the following new ones are added:
Office 2010 Blue, Office 2010 Silver, Office2010Black, Window 7, Vista. In the prerelease build of the product from
November 3, 2010 this feature is already included and available for testing. You may download the prerelease build
here .

Ribbon UI in Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf

Our developers continue improving Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf - reporting tool for Windows Presentation Foundation. Ribbon UI in the report viewer is added. Ribbon interface is organized simply and logically. All
controls are grouped according to their functions, which improves user interface usability. You can use the viewer right now. In the prerelease build of the product from November 3, 2010 this feature
is already included and available for evaluation. You may download the prerelease build here .

Reporting tool now for Silverlight

Stimulsoft Company, a leading manufacturer of software for business intelligence, is excited to announce the 2010.2 release of Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight – reporting tool for Silverlight.

“It took so much effort to design this long-expected for developers tool, - Anton Lozovsky, Stimulsoft. We position our company as a manufacturer of reporting tools for different technologies. Silverlight is a next technology we mastered.”

Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight consists of three parts. The first part is a set of ASP.NET components for viewing and editing in the Web browser. Report rendering occurs on the server. Showing and editing reports goes on the client side using the whole palette of capabilities of Silverlight. The second part is a fully featured reporting tool for Silverlight, which uses only Silverlight to render, edit, print, and export reports. The third part is an independent (standalone) report designer for the WinForms platform. It is designed to create reports and for further use with other components.

Silverlight and ASP.NET report viewer
Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight offers to use the ASP.NET component for viewing reports. Its client part is developed using the Silverlight technology. This makes it possible to display and use reports in the web-application with the same quality and with the same functionality as in desktop applications. Stimulsoft developers tried to make the most functional component, as far as it is allowed to make in Silverlight. The interface of the report viewer is more functional, more dynamic, and more interactive than the standard interfaces in a web browser. Also the viewer is more presentable than many report viewers for desktop applications.

Silverlight and ASP.NET report designer
The report designer is available as an ASP.NET component. The client part of this component works with the Silverlight technology. This component provides the ability to edit reports in the browser window when only Silverlight 4 Runtime is on the client side. And the report designer provides a complete set of tools for editing reports. Drag and drop operations, clipboard, undo-redo operation, wizards, Ribbon UI, visual Report Builder, zooming, tabular editing, and other features are available in the report designer. The component does not require any special installation on the server. All one needs to do is to drag the ASP.NET component on the page.

Reports in Silverlight
Stimulsoft also offers using a fully functional report generator for Silverlight. The report generator does not require a server and is designed to create reports in Silverlight applications outside of the browser. The following items are: the report engine (including exports to various formats), report viewer, report designer. All units of the reporting tool work exclusively in the Silverlight environment. This enables creating unique in its capability Silverlight applications for the desktop or mobile platforms.

Standalone report designer
The fully featured report designer for the WinForms platform is included to Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight. The report designer is used to create reports for further use them as well as in the ASP.NET environment and in the Silverlight environment. A standalone report designer provides a complete set of tools for creating and editing reports. It has fast and convenient GUI.

Miscellaneous
The product is localized in more than 25 languages. It has many wizards to create reports. It is possible to export reports to more than 30 formats. Reports created in other Stimulsoft reporting tools are fully compatible with the new product.

Pricing
Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight product is available with license for $599,95 per developer seat. The license comes with technical support and free updates for the latest products versions for one year.

Additional information on Stimulsoft Reports.Silverlight, as well as online demos, demonstrating the rich capabilities of the product, documentation, Video tutorials and a free evaluation copy of the product is available at http://www.stimulsoft.com

Stimulsoft Reporting – Styles for Reports

Styles are arguably the most important feature in Stimulsoft reporting. Why? Because element of a report has a style attached.
The definition of a style is two-fold. First, you can think of a style as a set of pre-defined formatting instructions that you can
use repeatedly throughout all reports in your application. Let's say each report header must be centered, uppercase, bold, and a
slightly larger font size. Each time you need to apply formatting to the heading, you have to go through the entire process to get
the text the way you want it. If you store the formatting commands in a style, you can apply that style any time you need it without
having to do all of the reformatting.

Possibly more important however is that styles are used to "tag" or identify parts of a report. An example of this is whether text is of data
type Numeric, a String, a DateTime, or an Expression. Styles can be created for complex controls such as Charts and Cross-Tab. These are all examples of styles in Stimulsoft reports.

If you're concerned about whether or not you need to learn styles, we can put it rather simply: you do. Styles allow for quick formatting modifications throughout the report and can be tied into columns or even particular data values to make working with conditional formatting much easier.

There are several reasons for using styles in a report:


• Consistency — when you use styles to format your report, each section is formatted the same and therefore, provides a professional, clean-looking report.
Moreover, these styles definitions can be shared among all reports in your application to given each report a consistent look and feel.


• Easier to Modify — If you use styles in your report consistently, you only need to update a given style once if you want to change the characteristics of all text formatted in that style.


• Efficiency — you can create a style once, and then apply it to any report without having to format each report individually.

Steps for Creating and Applying Styles:

1. Create a style in Ribbon GUI


2. Set a style for a report in Ribbon GUI


3. Create a style in Standard UI


4. Set a style for a report in Standard UI


5. Apply Style to report header






1. Create a style in Ribbon GUI

• Click on Style Designer Icon on the Home Ribbon;


• In the style designer, click on Add Style and select Component;


• Type the name as Report header;


• Type the description as This style will be applied to all report headers;


• Select the text brush color to any color of your choice as per user requirements;


• Select Brush of the background of the text as your choice, I selected glass to make it look cool;


• Set the border if required;


• Set Font and size;


• Set Horizontal and Vertical Align;


• Notice that the style preview changes as you make your selections;


• Hit Save button to save this style definition to used in other reports.

2. Set a style for a report in Ribbon GUI

• Report styles are stored with extension .sts;


• Open style designer to style as style for the report;


• Click on Open Style;


• Browse to the location where your report style has been stored and select it;


• Now Stimulsoft report designer loads all the style definitions.

3. Create a style in Standard UI

• Make sure that you have the style toolbar visible by going to View -> Toolbars -> Style;


• Once you have the style toolbar visible in your report designer click on the Style Designer Icon;


• In the style designer, click on Add Style and select Component;


• Type the name as Report header;


• Type the description as This style will be applied to all report headers;


• Select the text brush color to any color of your choice as per user requirements;


• Select Brush of the background of the text as your choice, I selected glass to make it look cool;


• Set the border if required;


• Set Font and size;


• Set Horizontal and Vertical Align;


• Notice that the style preview changes as you make your selections;


• Hit Save button to save this style definition to used in other reports.

4. Set a style for a report in Standard UI

• Report styles are stored with extension .sts;


• Open style designer to style as style for the report;


• Click on Open Style;


• Browse to the location where your report style has been stored and select it;


• Now Stimulsoft report designer loads all the style definitions.

5. Apply Style to report header

• Add a report title to your report;


• Add a text label inside the report title;


• Change the text to Sales Report and increase the width of the style to span the width of the report;


• Goto Appearance section of the properties of the label and select custom styles;


• Select Report Header;


• No we find that the report title has been formatted as per our style specifications.

The author of the article is Chirag Nirmal and his linkedin profile is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragn

Stimulsoft Report Checker – Cop for Reports

Stimulsoft reporting provides a tool that checks your reports for problems which you may miss. This tool
is unique to Stimulsoft and can be a very helpful feature for quality control. Users can run checks for warnings,
compilation errors, recommendations and even advice. In many cases the report checker can show you a preview of
the report with the problem area highlighted and also provides ways to fix the issues in the report definition file.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create shipping label report in Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf and check it
in Report Checker.Wpf and fix the errors, warnings and recommendations.

The data for this sample report will come from the
Northwind sample database provided by Microsoft.

The demo version of Stimulsoft reporting tools can be downloaded from the website
http://stimulsoft.com/ReportsNetDownloads.aspx.

Steps are required in order to create a simple report:

1. Add a connection to your report


2. Add required data sources to report


3. Add Orders to the report


4. Fix report in Report Checker






1. Add a data source to your report

• Open Stimulsoft Reports.Wpf Designer from start menu, the WPF designer is big improvement of the windows forms designer and looks very similar to the office 2010 interface;


• Select Dictionary Tab in the right pane;


• Select New Item and click on New Connection;


• The new connection wizard gives you various options for different types of connections, namely SQL connection, OleDB connection, XML data and ODBC connection;


• Select SQL connection for this tutorial;


• Give the connection any name that represents the database. For our example I will name it Northwind;


• Click on Build button to create a connection string or paste it into the connection string text area. You can also create your own connection string using instructions given on http://www.connectionstrings.com


• Click on the test button to make sure that the connection string works.

2. Add required data sources to report

• Right-click on the newly created Northwind connection and select New Data Source;


• Select Northwind and click OK;


• Stimulsoft reports will display all data objects that are available for reporting;


• For our example we will selected Orders and Order details tables and click OK;


• Orders and Order Details tables as now available under Northwind connection.

3. Add Orders to the report

• Find Data Band in Toolbox on Left side of report designer;


• Drag and drop the data band from toolbox into the report to create a new data band. When prompted for data source selection just click ok;


• Move your mouse to top right corner of data and to see various small buttons, click on the left most to select data source;


• Select orders to assign orders as the data source of the data band;


• Drap and Drop Text object into the Header to display Orders header;


• We will use HTML formatting to display Orders in Bold. Type <B>Orders</B> to display it in Bold;


• Drag and Drop Order Date, Ship Name, Ship Address, Ship City, Region, Country and Postal Code to the Data Band;


• This report will help users print shipping labels so we will need to a bar code also;


• Drag and Drop the bar code object into the data band;


• Right click on the barcode and select properties;


• Find the Code Property and click on … button on right most corner of the property;


• Drag and Drop the Order.Freight property into the text edit, this tells the report designer to generate barcodes based on value of freight;


• Click on the preview tab to see how the report looks with real data;


• Save the file as Order.mrt as a known location.

4. Fix report in Report Checker

• Open report checker from start menu;


• Click on the Open button and browse to Orders.mtr and click on Open;


• Report Checker will scan Order.mrt and display its findings;


• We can see that there are 2 warnings;


• The first warning shows as one of the components in the report is outside the page;


• To view which component is outside the page, simple move your move over to the magnifying glass to see a preview;


• We can clearly see that the bar code is highlighted in Red and is outside the page;


• I don’t need to go back to the report designer to fix, I can simply click on Move to page or To Print Area to fix this;


• Now I can go back to the report designer to see that the bar code has been moved inside the margin;


• The second warning shows that AllowHtmlTags property is set to False;


• Move your move over the magnifying glass to see that Orders header is highlighted;


• To fix this error simply click on the On button;


• When we go back to report designer we can see that the ugly <B> tags are gone and Orders text is displayed in bold;


• Now we can go to preview tab to see the final result.

The author of the article is Chirag Nirmal and his linkedin profile is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragn

Stimulsoft Simple Tabular Report using Business Objects

Stimulsoft reporting provides a set of powerful reporting tools for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2008 and 2010;
these tools are available for windows forms as well as web forms. They provide many useful features such as an easy
to use report designer and native support for exporting to PDF, Word, Excel, XPS and many other formats. Stimulsoft
reporting now supports binding to any .NET class; this feature is called business objects in the report designer.
Crystal Report and Microsoft reports are great for day to day reporting, but if you need to create reports with
cross-tabs and drill down, Ajax, support for barcodes and connecting to more than one report source at the same time,
then Stimulsoft reporting is a very good solution. They also have a feature where end users can create their own reports
for Adhoc reporting. All these features make Stimulsoft reports a good choice for business intelligence reporting.

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a Master Detail report using the Business Objects (.NET classes). Show how
to create an ADO.NET data model, register entities as business objects with Stimulsoft report designer and design a
tabular report and save the report definition file to run the newly created report.

The data for this sample report will come from the
Northwind sample database provided by Microsoft.

The demo version of Stimulsoft reporting tools can be downloaded from the website at
http://stimulsoft.com/ReportsNetDownloads.aspx.

Steps are required in order to create a Master Detail report using Business Objects

Add an ADO.NET data model to your project


2. Generate Entity Model for Northwind database


3. Register Business Objects with Report Desinger


4. Design new report using Business Objects


5. Associate Customers to child orders


6. Add Master and Detail tables to the report layout


7. Run new report using Business Objects






1. Add an ADO.NET data model to your project

• Make sure you are targeting .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1 or higher


• Right-click on project name in Solution Explorer


• Select Add and then select New Item


• Select ADO.NET Entity Date Model


• Type the name of the model file, for this tutorial it is going to be Northwind.edmx


• Click on Add button

2. Generate Entity Model for Northwind database

• Select Generate from database and click Next


• Choose the connection string for Northwind or build our own connection string using instructions given on http://www.connectionstrings.com


• Select all database objects that you want to report on. For this tutorial we are going to select only the tables.


• Type the namespace of the ADO.NET entity model as NorthwindModel or any other namespace or our choice and click on Finish.


• Visual studio will now scan the database schema and generate all required Entity model classes and definitions.


• Browse the Entity model to see various entities that are created.


• We will be using Customers entity to list all customers in our report.

3. Register Business Objects with Report Desinger

• Create a new form in your project


• Make sure you have added the reference to required Stimulsoft Reports.Net dlls by right-clicking on the project and selecting add reference.


• Add a button called Design Report and another button called Run Report.


• Create an event handler for the Design Report button.


• Add some code to get a list of customers and list of orders from those customers using Northwind entity model (For simplicity
we are getting list of all customers, in practice you would be using LINQ to form a query by following tutorials provided
Microsoft at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738636.aspx )


• The Entity Data Model shows that Customers has a property classes Orders, it also shows there are 1 to many relationship
between customers and orders.


• Create a new StiReport object and load the report definition from “C:\MyReport.mrt” if the file exists (For this tutorial
we have fixed the location of report file for simplicity)


• Register the list of customers and list of orders with the report object.


• Stimulsoft report designer scans the definition of customer and determines that it has child orders, this will be very
helpful while designing the report.


• Call the Design function of the report object to launch the designer.

     using Stimulsoft.Report;



   /// <summary>

   /// Event Handler for Design Report button

   /// </summary>

   private void Design_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

   {

     // Get Report Object

     StiReport report = GetReport();

     // Launch Report Deginer for the report

     report.Design();

   }



   /// <summary>

   /// This function Loads report definition from a fixed location

   /// and registers all Business Objects in the report definition

   /// </summary>

   ///

   /// StiReport object for the report

   ///

   private StiReport GetReport()

   {

     // Create a new object of StiReport Class

     StiReport report = new StiReport();



     // Load the report definition file from C:\MyReport.mrt if the file exists

     // This tutorial assumes you have are storing the report definition in a fixed location

     // If the file does not exists then Designer will allow you to save the your newly created report in the location

     if (File.Exists("C:\\MyReport.mrt"))

     {

       report.Load("C:\\MyReport.mrt");

     }



     // Get of List of all customers and List of all orders from database using ADO.net Enity data model

     NorthWindEntities nw = new NorthWindEntities();

     List customers = nw.Customers.ToList();

     List orders = nw.Orders.ToList();

     nw.Dispose();

     // Register Business Objects for Customers and Orders in the report
     report.RegBusinessObject("Northwind", "Customers", customers);
     report.RegBusinessObject("Northwind", "Orders", orders);


     // Return report to calling function

       return report;

     }


4. Design new report using Business Objects

• On run the project by pressing F5 on your keyboard or click on Start Debugging button in Visual Studio

• Click on Design Report button to show the Stimulsoft report designer

• Brower to Dictionary and Expand Business Objects

• Northwind is shown here because we specified category of Customers while registering business objects using RegBusinessObject function

• Expand Northwind to see customers and orders

• Expand Customers to see all the fields that belong to customers

• Expand Orders to see all the fields that belong to orders

5. Associate Customers to child orders

• In order to associate Customer to their child orders we need to show orders under customers

• Right click on Customers and select New Business Object

• Select Child of Business Object

• Select Orders from the list of children of Customers

• Make any changes alias of orders or to columns inside Orders or add new calculated columns

• Click Ok to continue

6. Add Master and Detail tables to report layout

• Drag Customers and drop into the report layout to add customers table to the design

• Select all the fields that you want to show in the report

• Drag Orders under customers and drop into the report layout to add orders table to the design

• Select all the fields that you want to show in the report

• Report designer automatically shows details grouped by master

• Change background color of Customers to differentiate it from details

• Click on Preview tab to see the report preview

• Click on Save Report icon save to C:\MyReport.mrt

• Close the report designer

7. Run new report using Business Objects

• Add a event handler for Run Report button

• Create new StiReport object and load the report definition from “C:\MyReport.mrt”
if the file exists (For this tutorial we have fixed the location of report file for simplicity)

• Add code to get a list of customers and list of orders from those customers using Northwind
entity model (For simplicity we are getting list of all customer, in practice you would be using
LINQ to form a query by following tutorials provided Microsoft at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738636.aspx ) )

• The Entity Data Model shows that’s Customers has a property classes Orders, it also shows there
are a 1 to many relationship between customers and orders.

• Create new StiReport object and load the report definition from “C:\MyReport.mrt”
if the file exists (For this tutorial we have fixed the location of report file for simplicity)

• Register the list of customers and list of orders with the report object.

• Call the Show function of the report object to launch the report viewer.

     using Stimulsoft.Report;

     /// <summary>

     /// Event Handler for Run Report button

     /// </summary>

     private void btnRun_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

     {

       // Get Report Object

       StiReport report = GetReport();

       // Show report to user

       report.Show();

     }





   /// <summary>

   /// This function Loads report definition from a fixed location

   /// and registers all Business Objects in the report definition

   /// </summary>

   ///

   /// StiReport object for the report

   ///

   private StiReport GetReport()

   {

     // Create a new object of StiReport Class

     StiReport report = new StiReport();



     // Load the report definition file from C:\MyReport.mrt if the file exists

     // This tutorial assumes you have are storing the report definition in a fixed location

     // If the file does not exists then Designer will allow you to save the your newly created report in the location

     if (File.Exists("C:\\MyReport.mrt"))

     {

       report.Load("C:\\MyReport.mrt");

     }



     // Get of List of all customers and List of all orders from database using ADO.net Enity data model

     NorthWindEntities nw = new NorthWindEntities();

     List customers = nw.Customers.ToList();

     List orders = nw.Orders.ToList();

     nw.Dispose();



     // Register Business Objects for Customers and Orders in the report

     report.RegBusinessObject("Northwind", "Customers", customers);

     report.RegBusinessObject("Northwind", "Orders", orders);



     // Return report to calling function

     return report;

   }









The author of the article is Chirag Nirmal and his linkedin profile is
http://www.linkedin.com/in/chiragn