Rendering engine Upgrade in Coresuite Designer

Table of Contents

I Introduction

II Improvements

III Important and Useful - last update 14.01.2022

I Introduction (Back to Table of Contents)

The rendering engine is the powerful .NET report component that will easily add reporting features to the Windows Forms apps. It allows the creation of elegant and visually appealing reports in the intuitive report designer and delivering of reports to end-users in the desktop report viewer or provide them in a document format (PDF, Excel, RTF, HTML, XPS, etc.) for further exploration and analysis.

The rendering engine is a core component of our Coresuite Designer and due to issues that were fixed in it during past years, improvements, implementation of missing features and functionalities (such as e.g. new xlsx format in Microsoft Excel), we decided to upgrade this component in our product and we are delivering it in Coresuite Designer 7.55.

II Improvements (Back to Table of Contents)

In addition to visible GUI changes in Coresuite Report Designer, below you can find some of the major improvements and fixes for issues that were reported the most often:

• Added support of new file formats/extensions: XLSX, PNG, CSV.
• Crashes of the rendering engine when working with PivotTable in Coresuite Report Designer.
• Fix for an issue with embedded font in PDF file, which was not used in PDF at all.
• The blurred font in PDF files after export of documents from SAP Business One.
  

III Important and Useful (Back to Table of Contents)

 11.03.2022

• Fields are not displayed on exported PDF layouts and documents:
  When you preview the document or a report, all values are visible as expected, however, when you export the same layout to PDF file, some values or fields are missing. We noticed this behavior for fields where the font does not fit into the textbox field due to its size, which is caused by the change of calculation of objects in the new rendering engine. We fixed this issue on our reports and layouts, however, your custom layouts will need a modification of affected fields/layouts. Open affected layouts in the rendering engine Designer, navigate to the affected fields, open its properties and increase their Y-axis size +0.1cm.
  The issue is in the  rendering engine product. We opened a ticket to the engine-provider and are waiting for their further update.

     10.03.2022

• Layout reinstallation required:
  When we change something on a standard system layout, for the change to take effect, the layout needs to be reinstalled via Import/Export of Designer. Please see our Release notes for more details about layouts that need reinstallation: https://helpdesk.coresystems.ch/hc/en-us/articles/201844932-Release-Notes
  

     10.02.2022

• Change of behavior for objects position in "PageOverlay" container:
  Another improvement in the new rendering engine is an introduction of a new property for the PageOverlay control: "RenderMode". RenderMode is responsible for the calculation of the position of objects in a container PageOverlay, which is causing some visual distortions on layouts. The RenderMode property in the new rendering engine can have three possible values:
  1. Default (which was set in the layout)
  2. PageTop
  3. UnderHeader
  We will change this behavior on our standard layouts, however, your custom layouts will need a modification of this parameter/property via the rendering engine Designer to "PageTop" in order to achieve the same look as was in the previous version of the rendering engine.

     28.01.2022

• Missing some fields on exported PDF layout of Swiss QR-Bill (DOC00021) :
  When you preview the document, the layout looks fine, however, when you export the document, some fields are missing. We will fix the affected layout mentioned above. However, a quick fix, for now, is to duplicate the affected system layout, open it in the rendering engine Designer, navigate to the affected fields, open its properties and increase their Y-axis size +0.1cm, or use the fixed layout with the name "7.60_Swiss QR-Bill.xml" attached below.

     25.01.2022

• Missing decimals on some standard reports:
  The new version of rendering engine introduces also a new property/parameter for TextFormat of numbers. In the previous version, the TextFormat property of TextBox had a format of "Number", now you can see in the properties of the field also how many decimals the number contains. So the format changed from "Number" to "Number: n*" , where * is the number of decimals. Some of our reports (FIN05404 or FIN05402) had in some textboxes (textBox143, textBox144, and textBox146) a default value 0 for decimals, however, they were supposed to have 2 decimals and take this decimals value from local (Windows) settings anyway. New rendering engine considers this 0 as a default value, and although it is supposed to take system format, it does not. We will fix the affected layouts mentioned above and also the behavior of a tick-box "Use local settings". However, a quick fix, for now, is to duplicate the affected system layout, open it in the rendering engine Designer, navigate to the affected field, open its properties and change the grayed out 0 to 2. Then tick again "Use local settings" in order to take separator of decimals, thousands, etc, from Windows settings.
  
  07.01.2022
• Due to many objects, combinations of objects, and ways of how layouts in Coresuite Report Designer can be customized,  we recommend testing of new Coresuite Designer version on the backup of the production database in a separate test environment first to see if all layouts look as expected. Please keep in mind that due to the fact that the rendering engine has not been updated in Coresuite Designer for a long time and there were introduced many improvements, your custom layouts/reports might need revisiting and also changes in case there will be some visual differences compared to the previous version.
• When you created layout designs in the previous version of Coresuite Report Designer (prior to Coresuite Designer 7.55),  the rendering engine allowed you to insert any objects without StyleName (in Microsoft Office known as e.g. Normal, Heading 1, Strong, etc.). In the new version of the rendering engine, it is not allowed and you need to use some StyleName. If you had some layouts without these StyleNames, now after upgrade of Coresuite Designer it can happen that a "Normal" StyleName will be used automatically for such objects and e.g. a border will be used around text boxes. In order to fix layouts in the new rendering engine/Coresuite Report Designer quickly, just open the layout in Coresuite Report Designer, go to Format → Edit Styles, double-click on Border, remove it, and save the layout.
• Nowadays, there are 2 types of fonts that are used in IT. TrueType and OpenType. The rendering engine supports only TrueType fonts. With OpenType, fonts you can face crashes of the rendering engine in Coresuite Report Designer.

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