Its May, and thus all the animals big and small go wild on their eternal quest to spread their genes. Thats fine and nice, and unless they make their mess in my backyard (not that I have a backyard) – so all is OK by my standards. But not just animals feel the need to go all wild – the report designer feels this urge too. Look how it peacocks around, spreads its features to attract data.

Today, the last feature implementation sprint ends, and thus we are now in a fairly feature complete state. There are bits and bolts that need adjustment, and a whole family of bugs needs to be sent to the next, hopefully better world, where all code is written in C++ with lots of places to hide and procreate. During the comming six weeks we will now concentrate on hardening the code to make this the best report-designer the BI space has to offer.

If you haven’t seen the new breed, then now is a good time to do so, and you will see that comparing Citrus to the older releases is like comparing monkeys to humans – some features are still recognizable, but the effects of evolution are clearly visible.

Despite the fact that I talked about feature completeness a few lines earlier, I’m not to cheap to contradict myself immediately saying that one big feature will make it into the engine during the next days: Rich text support is comming to the reporting engine. Technically, we already supported this for a very long time – but without a sane user-model to create rich.text this was not a usable feature at all. Now that we finally came up with a decent specification, we can solve that task once and for all.

The last three weeks saw great changes (again). The Report-Design-Wizard, which now has a slick (or in CEO speak: sexy) design and a groovy Mortal Combat like logo. Managing datasources and queries got easier – a right click on the query now allows you to select that query as the active one or to edit it directly. The platform integration now allows to schedule the XAction-less reports and Will Gorman sneaked some more crosstab-editing in. The inspector is back from his vacation, and tells you (whether you want to hear it or not) about all the wrongs in the report-definition. And last but not least, a new display mode now highlights overlapping elements that would be removed when the report gets exported to any of the table-export output types.

So if you haven’t done it yet, then go to our Hudson server right now and check out the latest Citrus release.