Subscription period extention

Version 12.8 took us longer than usual to roll out. As an apology and a thank you for your patience we have extended all existing and recently expired new version subscriptions by 4 months. Thank you all for using XFRX!

New XFRX version - 12.8

This is a bug-fix release with a new previewer feature: the ability to specify the default look of the previewer screen with zoom, pages per sheet, starting page and the default output file name.

New features

• XFRX previewer - file selection button ([...]) has been added to the export options form
• XFRX previewer - new properties for default values for zoom, pages-per-sheet, default output name and a starting page:
  A new object-type property has been added to the XFCont, cntXFRXMultipage and frmMPPreviewer classes: oDisplayDefaults. It has the following properties:
  • StartingPage (integer) - the 1st page to show in the previewer. Default value is 1.
  • DefaultOutputFileName (string) - the default output file name when exporting from the previewer
  • PagesPerSheet (string) - encoded pages per sheet layout value. Default value: 1x1. Allowed values: 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, 3x1, 3x2, 4x2.
  • ZoomFactor (integer) - the zoom factor. default value = 100. -1 = fit to width, -2 = fit page. The zoom factor will be used only of PagesPerSheet is 1x1, otherwise it defaults to -2.
  
  Example:

  loPreview = CREATEOBJECT("frmMPPreviewer")

  loPreview.oDisplayDefaults.StartingPage = 2 

  loPreview.oDisplayDefaults.DefaultOutputFileName = "invoice15_09"

  loPreview.oDisplayDefaults.ZoomFactor = -1 

  loPreview.oDisplayDefaults.PagesPerSheet = "1x1" loPreview.PreviewXFF(loXFF) 

  loPreview.show(1)     

Bugs fixed

• Dynamic properties in VFP 9.0 - dynamic textbox background is now displayed correctly
• Word output - the page margins are updated so that wide reports fit into the paper size
• PDF output - word wrapping algorithm didn't intermittently work properly with dashes and some other characters that allow for wrapping to a new line
• PDF output - fonts with no code page are now properly handled if a code page is specified
• PDF output - left and center alignment calculation shift in GDI+ mode has been fixed
• Word output - the temporary XML copy of the word document could have been left undeleted with certain Word versions
• Previewer - XFRX previewer now works properly in top-level forms
• "@Z$" format string is now handled properly
• Printing - the printer paper size is now automatically pre-selected with the report paper size
• 'X_TRIM missing' error is fixed
• Excel output in VFP 9.0/SP2 now properly exports numeric values and numeric formats - if you need the numeric values, set the CallEvaluateContents property of the xfrxlistener to 2.
  More details: the actual bug was caused by the new Listener properties introduced in SP2: CallAdjustObjectSize, CallEvaluateContents. When the default parent report listener is used (fxlistener at FFC), it checks for the report dynamics and if there are not any, it sets these two properties to 1 and thus disables the EvaluateContents calls. However, when EvaluateContents is not called, XFRX won't know about the actual numeric value and the output will be exported as a text.

Release notes: http://www.eqeus.com/whatsnew/whatsnew128.html

New XFRX version - 12.7

A new XFRX version has been released this weekend. Finally I was able to get rid of the fatal error that was occuring intermitently on some Vista machines (while it was working on others). Misteriously enough, the problem turned out to be a memory leak in one of my c++ routines :">.

New features and bug fixes:

• Trim mode is option now supported in all VFP versions
• Shape fill pattern is now correctly rendered in picture and print output
• Intermittent crashing on Windows Vista with specific printers has been fixed
• The printed output was occasionally shifted for specific printers
• Open office output layout issues have been fixed
• Page-range filtering didn't work for merged reports

XFRX previewer:

• Double-click on a custom hyperlink executed the linked event twice
• Bookmark panel size wasn't setup correctly during drilldown
• The previewer form didn't work correctly inside top-level forms
• Occasional screen flickering during drilldown
• Print options do not show if no printers are installed
• Middle click now closes the active tab

Release notes: http://www.eqeus.com/whatsnew/whatsnew127.html

New XFRX version has been released (12.6)

A new XFRX version has been released this weekend (release notes here). We have fixed the nasty bug with XFRX switching SET NULL ON, fixed some dynamic features for VFP 9 SP2 and introduced the following new features:

• Full justification. Text areas can now me marked as full justified by adding to the comment of the report field. The feature covers print and preview, picture output, MS Word output and PDF.
• Absolute layout boxes in Word output are now automatically expandable - so if you hit Enter in the box in the word output, the box height will automatically grow to accommodate the new line
• Hyperlink decoration can now be suppressed on the printer output.
  I am sure the blue and green hyperlinks are cool in the previewer, but they may not be so cool in the printer output. The XFRX previewer components now have a new property that control this behavior.
• Custom buttons in the XFRX previewer toolbar
  XFRX now allow for adding custom buttons to the previewer using new events of the extension handler mechanism

Known issues

• Recently we found out that Open Office changed something in their internal document format in Open Office 2.4 and our Open Office output can produce a broken layout if you use it with the latest version of Open Office. We are now working on fixing this and will post an updated version as soon as it is ready.
• XFRX does not support the new trim options in VFP 9. The next update will include a fix for this, too.
  

The evaluation version is available for download from our web site at http://www.eqeus.com/xfrxdownload.php

Our customers with valid subscription can download the new version from http://www.eqeus.net/xfrx

New XFRX version (12.2) was released today

The new version fixes some regressions of the XFRX previewer redesign in 12.0 plus several other issues in PDF and other output formats.

The Export and Print dialogs in the XFRX previewer were redesigned, with the following new features: printing multiple copies, printing/exporting even/odd/all pages, scaling multiple pages into a single sheet and seting a DPI for generated images.

Ver. 12.0 Release notes | Evaluation version download | Documentation

English session at Prague

It has been confirmed that there will be two XFRX session at the Prague DevCon. The Czech session will be held on Monday, the English one on Tuesday.
See you there!

XFRX session at the Prague DevCon

Should you be interested in seing XFRX in action, you are very welcome to my session about XFRX at the Prague Devcon, which is held on 11 and 12 September, 2006.
It hasn't yet been finalized if there will be one XFRX session (in Czech) or also a second one in English. I will update this post as soon as I know more details.

New XFRX version is out (12.0)

The final release has just been released. I would like to thank to everyone who participated in the beta versions evaluation. The feedback was very valuable for us.

The new version contains 3 new output types (various flavours of OpenOffice), unicode support in PDF (so Chinese, Korean and Japanese character sets, as well as multiple code pages within one document are now supported).

Another significant change is the completely reworked previewer. I have finally abandoned the idea of using foxpro native visual objects to render the page (although it actually seemed to be a good idea when I was beginning the works on the previewer :) ) - it was just too slow (the biggest complaint about the previewer) and the layout wasn't 100% accurate due to differences between GDI and GDI+.

So, the previewer is now using GDI+ to render the page. It is much faster (moving from one page to another should be about 50 times faster now), the layout is exactly the same as the printed output and it also supports unicode and rotation (even in VFP 6).

The biggest complication here for me was to prevent my dlls calls and the native VFP routines from fighting on who's going to be refresing the form, result of which was often various flickering, slow or incomplete refreshing, etc., which was also the main reason of the two beta versions prior the final release. I hope you will like the result :).

The 2nd biggest complaint about the previewer was the slowness of the searching feature - it was somewhat unusable for documents with 100+ pages.
The speed has been improved significantly, and also the design has changed a bit. The whole document is now searched and the results are displayed in the side bar on the left (where bookmarks are normally displayed). You can click on the individual search result entries to navigate to the corresponding places in the document.

Ver. 12.0 Release notes | Download | Documentation

New version of XFRX has been released (version 11.3)

The new version of XFRX comes with a redesigned report previewer supporting tabbed interface, drill-down and exporting features. The new version also includes: "fake" toolbar option, previewer extension handler, Hebrew support in PDF, autimatic reduction of images DPI and more.

Ver. 11.3 Release notes | Download | Documentation

New version of XFRX exports to OpenOffice (version 11.2)

OpenOffice is using the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, which is also supported by a variety of other office applications including StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace. XFRX generates the file format natively, so OpenOffice doesn’t have to be installed on the computer where the document is generated.
More information about OpenOffice can be found at http://www.openoffice.org.

Ver. 11.2 Release notes | Download | Documentation