Nevrona Designs Newsletter - June 3rd, 2004
Table of Contents
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* Rave Reports 5.1.3 BEX Released. Upgrade today!
* Rave Reports for .NET - Delphi 8 for .NET and beyond
* Rave Newsletter Tips and Tricks
* Enhance your Rave with hot stuff for cool reports!
Rave Reports 5.1.3 BEX Released. Upgrade today!
================================================
We're happy to announce the immediate availability of Rave Reports 5.1.3 BEX
(Borland Edition eXtended). Just some of the recent enhancements that have
been made to Rave since the original 5.0 release are:
* New Data Viewer to allow the viewing of a DataView's data from within the
Rave report designer
* New band component expert that allows for easier creation of header, footer
and detail bands
* New language options for French, German and Japanese help files and Rave
report designer interfaces.
* New scripting demo project and documentation
* New code based printing support within scripting - Now you can merge code
based and visual reports!
* New Visible property scripting support and ability to delete scripting events
* New MBCS support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) for the PDF render.
* Enhanced DataLink system: Better error reporting, "Test Connection" buttons
and ADO timeout parameters.
* New Interbase Express DataLink driver
If you currently own Rave 5.0 BEX, the upgrade to Rave 5.1.3 BEX is free and
available for download from the registered users download page.
If you would like to upgrade from a previous version of Rave (or Rave BE) to
the latest and greatest please visit the online order page for special upgrade
pricing:
https://secure.nevrona.com/order/index.html
For more information on Rave Reports 5 please visit
http://www.nevrona.com/rave/features.html
or contact our sales staff at:
sales@nevrona.com
Rave Reports for .NET - Delphi 8 for .NET and beyond
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Borland once again included Nevrona's Rave Reports with their latest release of
Delphi, version 8 for .NET. This is Nevrona Designs' first .NET release and is
based on the Borland VCL.NET class libraries for maximum backwards
compatibility with Delphi for Win32 projects. The Nevrona developers, however,
are hard at work completing another .NET port of Rave that is based on
Microsoft's Framework class libraries (FCL) for the ultimate in .NET reporting.
What about Delphi for Win32? No need to worry, Nevrona developers are also
hard at work on Rave Reports 6.0 for the Win32 platform. More information on
these future versions of Rave will be made available in the near future through
the Nevrona Designs announcement lists and the Nevrona Designs website.
Rave Newsletter Tips and Tricks
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Code based Reporting Tip:
The TBaseReport.SelectPrinter method takes a printer name as it's only
parameter to select an available printer on the users system. However, if the
exact name of the printer is not found, Rave then looks for a printer name that
contains the provided name. This would allow you to call SelectPrinter with
only a partial name such as 'Fax' or 'Laser' to work on a wider variety of
system configurations.
Visual Reporting Tip:
When you drop a new band or databand in a region component, it always goes to
the bottom of the list of bands. You can change the position that a band
appears in a region by first selecting it and then use the Move Forward (moves
down) and Move Behind (moves up) buttons on the Alignment toolbar. For even
greater simplicity, you can right click on a databand and select "Create" to
create header and footer bands that will already show up in the correct
location in the region with the ControllerBand and BandStyles properties set to
the correct values.
Enhance your Rave with hot stuff for cool reports!
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If you haven't checked out the add-ons page for Rave recently you should
certainly do so now.
http://www.nevrona.com/rave/addons.shtml
Some of the more recent additions for Rave 5.x include:
* Links to several excellent tutorial articles on Rave - First Step for Rave
with Delphi and Introduction to Rave Part I & II
* TRvBoldConnection component to use Rave and Bold together
* EAN8 barcode component
* SoftSand Fax Render - This native VCL component, will allow you to FAX any
Rave visual or code based report through the Windows NT/2000/XP faxing
platform. Simply drop the component onto your report form, set the component
properties, adjust Rave's "report destination" property, and your ready to go!
* wPDF Render - Supports strong encryption, compression and embedded metafiles
will be exported as vectors and text to minimize the size of the PDF file while
preserving all information for quality print out.
* WPCubed GmbH Free Renders - Free graphics rendering class that will create
EMF, JPEG and BMP files.
* AddictTools for RAVE - Uses the Addict Spell Check & Thesaurus Engine to
supply Live Spelling, Dialog-based Spelling Check & Thesaurus Lookup for Text
based entries in Rave Reports.
* Gnostice RaveRender - A highly enhanced rendering add-on that can save your
Rave reports to PDF, HTML, RTF, Excel, Text, JPEG, GIF, BMP, EMF and WMF. You
get more than just Save Report: End-user Dialogs (to configure the export),
Watermarking facilities, E-Mailing (of saved reports), Web Reporting facilities
and lots more.
* ESBTools for Rave v1.02 - Supplies the following: Calculator Property Editor
(scientific calculator with memory), Colored Number DataText Component (Set
Different Color of Values that are Positive and Negative; Allow Blank when
"Zero"; Change the "Zero" position via the property CutOff; Change the
Tolerance used).
* ESBRaveViewer - Displays NDR files produced by Rave. Saves the Report in the
following formats: PDF, HTML, RTF, Excel, Text and selected Graphic types.
* Rave Overview Presentation from ADUG 2003 Symposium - This presentation
contains many useful examples and tutorials for Rave.
* Advantage, Oracle and Interbase DataLink drivers