GRW 2.50 new features

This publication includes information about new features and changes in existing functionality.

Important:

This page covers only those new features introduced with the GRW version specified in the page title. Check prior new features pages if you migrate from an earlier version. Make sure to also read the upgrade guide corresponding to this version.

Important:

This version of GRW is desupported, use a more recent version of the product.

Corresponding upgrade guide: GRW 2.50 upgrade guide.

Previous new features page: GRW 2.41 new features

These changes and enhancements are relevant to this publication. See also Migration notes for Version 2.50.

Table 1. General
Overview	Reference
Mac® OS support.	No further reference.
Configurations are stored on the remote host allowing users to reconnect from another machine with configurations intact.	See Migration notes for GRW 2.50 upgrade guide.
User documentation has been migrated to XML-based DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture).	No further reference.
Distributed mode. Allows the report engine to be started as a daemon to which Genero applications can connect to process the reports, allowing for vastly faster processing for short documents and improved scalability.	See Deployment architecture.

Table 3. Genero Report Designer
Overview	Reference
Tables support.	See Working with tables
Pivot tables support.	See Working with pivot tables.
PDF enhancements. Improved PDF output, to include better memory consumption, use of the PDF referencing mechanism to improve Page M of N processing, share recurring images and CID keyed fonts support.	No further reference.
Null value support.	See The String Class and The Numeric Class, Conditional Expressions.
Improved trigger updates. Algorithm improved to remove the need for frequent manual adjustments for each change within the data schema (rdd) file.	See Triggers.
QR code barcode support.	See qr-code.
Display position of footers. Layout nodes designated as footers display at the bottom of the Mini Page, providing a WYSIWYG experience for the report designer.	See Add headers and footers to a report.
Element creation by context. Create elements based on the document context in the report design. The object type created for a field is determined by the location in the document.	See Adding fields from the Data View.
Splitting of oversized elements across pages to prevent overfill.	See Split Oversized Items (splitOversizedItem).
Rotation of items. When the Transform transparently property is set on a parent, its children map their orientation based on the parent's parent orientation rather than the parent.	See Transform transparently (transformTransparently).
Support for reverse side printing.	See Specify a different reverse side page.
Chart sorting. For Map Charts and Category Charts, the sortBy property allows you to specify how the data is sorted: alphabetic, numeric, or by order of declaration of the chart items. The sortAscending property allows you to sort in ascending or descending order.	See Sort By (sortBy) and Sort Ascending (sortAscending).
Fallback image support when the requested image for an Image Box is not found.	See Image Box.
Edit triggers with a Repeat selected items on menu option in the context menu in the Report Structure view, allowing you to select a trigger to be the parent of a document node.	See Place a trigger within the report structure.
Class property added for report elements.	See Class (class).
Display and modify the sizing policy of containers.	See Modify the sizing policy of containers.
The fidelity property has been added to business charts and the pivot table, applied only when the object in question is drawn as a table.	See Business Graphs.
The layout direction of a parent container is highlighted in the Genero Report Designer by the addition of a dashed, slowly moving, U-shaped yellow border.	See Layout Direction (layoutDirection).
Preference added to control the appearance of RTL expressions in the document view.	See Report Writer preferences.
Added options to facilitate the mass generation of images that are sized by their content (e.g. for web sites).	See fgl_report_setImageUsePageNamesAsFileNames and fgl_report_setImageShrinkImagesToPageContent.

Table 4. Genero Reporting APIs
Overview
Specify the server where a Genero Report Engine is running in server mode.	See fgl_report_configureDistributedProcessing.
Configure the environment when the daemon is running on a different machine with different resource directories.	See fgl_report_configureDistributedEnvironment.
Distinguish between log entries originating from different users.	See fgl_report_setDistributedRequestingUserName.
"Postscript" has been added as an output format to the function `fgl_report_selectDevice`. The function `fgl_report_setPrinterWriteToFile` is deprecated.	See fgl_report_setPrinterWriteToFile and fgl_report_selectDevice.
The Reporting API source has been split into two files, libgre.4gl and libgreprivate.4gl. These two files replace helpers.4gl.	See Reporting API Functions.
Specify whether the report is printed in portrait or landscape.	See fgl_report_setSVGOrientationRequested.
Switch off Unicode embedding. This is useful when the entire report uses Latin characters only, improving performance and document size.	See fgl_report_configurePDFFontEmbedding.
The function `fgl_report_configureAutoformatOutput` has changed from "sort by position of fields in PRINT statement" to "sort by matched pattern and then by position of field in PRINT statement."	See fgl_report_configureAutoformatOutput.
To follow the general pattern that calling a function with a NULL value exhibits the same behavior as not calling the function at all, the default values for the first three first parameters of the function `fgl_report_configureImageDevice` have changed to true.	See fgl_report_configureImageDevice.
The functions to load and commit report settings for the Genero Report Engine now search `FGLRESOURCEPATH` and `DBPATH` for relative file names. The function `fgl_report_findResourcePath` has been deprecated as a result.	See fgl_report_loadCurrentSettings, fgl_report_loadAndCommit, and fgl_report_findResourcePath.
Runtime localization. Report can now be localized independent of the language settings of the application.	See Change localization settings at runtime.