Today I uploaded the release candidate for the upcoming Classic Engine 0.8.10.
This release started as a pure infrastructure release, that was aimed to help us to prepare the battle field for the side-by-side subreports, multi-column reports and the long awaited cross-tabbing. But as usual when humans make plans, the Gods interfered.
And therefore (Btw: Thanks for messing up my plans again, Gods! Life could be so easy!) our list of new features is huge again.
- The reporting engine now supports a new, unified fileformat based on the ODF standard.
- The massive number of different Report-Elements for dealing with images, shapes and drawables got reduced to the total number of two elements, which now cover everything.
- All report elements can carry attributes and attributes can be computed at runtime now. Due to the report attributes, we are now able to support interactivity, inject code into HTML pages, add Excel-page-header and footer and insert Excel-Formulas into the Cell.
- The data-sources transfer Meta-Data from the data-layer into the report. This enables reports to utilize the Pentaho-MetaData system.
- Report-Definitions now manage their own parameters, inclusive the ability to auto-generate parameter-pages and to validate the parameter values (and all of that without XActions or any other expensive magic).
- All report elements and expressions/functions ship with machine-readable meta-data, so that tools like the Report-Designer know what features the engine supports and how to use them.
If everything goes as planned, the final GA-Version of the Classic-Engine will follow one week later.