What's new

Reworked software. We revised the design strategy of XL Report. It still is a single component on the component palette (see "Compatibility with XL Report G2", though) that allows you to define report data and properties in a fast and convenient way. But from within, it became a more deep hierarchy of classes allowing creation of several levels of abstraction and solving the task of extension of product's features effectively.

XLOptionPack technology. XL Report core is built on this technology, which bases on two classes - TxlOption and TxlOptionPackage. The first one allows describing an option and process it or overload an existing option, extend its features and maybe change its behavior completely. The second one (it descends from TComponent) allows creation of option packages and their distribution independently of XL Report. Having been placed on any form of an application such a package will register its options in XL Report core automatically, allowing in such a way to use the options from the option package along with standard options. In the context of this technology, all options are separate classes now. These classes are gathered into the standard option package, which is installed automatically when you install XL Report.

Unlimited Master-detail. XL Report can process nested ranges in order to reflect one-to-many relation between datasets. You create such a template and set the MasterSourceName property of the DataSources collection items. The number of nesting levels is not limited; any range can contain an unlimited number of nested ranges. Design restrictions are minimal.

Composite reports. You can make use of effective built-in feature of merging several reports in one report.

Open source code. In order to allow better understanding of XL Report principles, we have opened source code of base classes and standard options. You can use them as samples of extending XL Report core features.

Compatibility with XL Report G2

XL Report contains the only component class. Its name in version 4 is TxlReport. For compatibility on the source code level the TxlReportG2 component is installed, which is ported to XL the new XL Report core. For all of your new projects we recommend to use the TxlReport component only. This guide describes only this component. The "XL Report G2 Developer's Guide" devoted to the TxlReportG2 component class is available on the AfalinaSoft site.

XL Report 4 doesn't provide support for the following features of XL Report G2:

• MultiSheet option has been replaced with TxlReport.MultisheetAlias and TxlReport.MultisheetField properties.
• TargetBook option is replaced with the TxlReport.ReportTo method, which accept the path and file name of the target workbook.
• OnGetDataInfo and OnGetFieldValue events are excluded. We offer several new properties and events that allow flexible defining your data. The newly developed mechanism operating with non-TDataSet data is oriented on large data volumes in the first place.
• ExtXXXOptions properties and corresponding OnXXXOption events are excluded because of introducing XLOptionPack technology.
• TxlReport.ClearDataSource method is not supported any more. The replacement is the TxlReport.DataSources.Clear method.
• TxlReport.ReportToOLEContainer method is excluded.