Application extensibility

Usability enhancements for the Report Designer

The usability of the LN Report Designer has been increased. You can now perform more manipulations if multiple fields are selected simultaneously.

These improvements have been added to the Report Designer:

  • When multiple fields are selected, you can drag the left, right, top, and bottom anchors to enlarge all selected fields in absolute steps.

    It may happen that one of the selected fields cannot be enlarged further because of a collision with another field or a layout boundary. In that case the enlargement stops, both in vertical or horizontal directions, for all selected fields.

  • The top menu bar now contains buttons for the left, right, top, and bottom alignment of multiple selected fields.

    This alignment action might result in a collision with any other field or layout boundary. In that case the alignment buttons become disabled during the process of selecting the fields.

  • When multiple fields are selected, you could already manipulate these properties in the Properties panel:
    • Data Alignment: Left / Middle / Right and Top / Middle / Bottom
    • Colors: Font / Background
    • Font Type: Bold / Italic / Underscore
    • Font: All fonts available in the Fonts by Usage Categories (ttaad3562m000) session
    • Font Size: All sizes available by the font
    • Excel: Column / Row specification
  • When multiple fields are selected, you can now also manipulate these properties in the Properties panel.
    • The Borders property is made editable.
    • "Exact Positioning" mode: Left, Top, Width, Height.
    • "Columns & Rows" mode: Column, Line, Width, Height
    • These fields are always editable. If the value is presented as 'empty', you can use the + and - buttons to perform a resize action.
    • For an enhanced usability, the property tooltip now contains an extra value called "Limited shared size". This is the limited value you can specify in the shared property fields.
    • The above mentioned fields now have an extra option to specify a + or - followed by a <delta value>.
    • This <delta value> is added to, or subtracted from, the original value of the property field.
    • For an enhanced usability, the property tooltip now contains a second extra value called "Limited shared delta". This is the limited delta value you can specify in the shared property fields.
  • If multiple layouts are selected, then this situation applies:
    • If the individual personalized print conditions are not equal, the Personalized Print Condition property field must be presented in read-only mode.

      In addition, this message is displayed:

      Multiple different conditions found, so editing is not possible

    • If the individual personalized print conditions are equal, the Personalized Print Condition property field is presented as editable. The shared personalized print condition is displayed.
  • In the Properties panel of multiple selected layouts, the Width and Height property fields are acting the same as for multiple selected fields.

    In addition, two new tooltips are added to show the "Maximum" and "Minimum" height of the selected layouts.

Prevent severe Issues when removing domain extensions

To prevent that a "Convert to Runtime Data Dictionary" step fails because of changes to a domain extension, a new session has been created:

Validate Domain Extension (ttext1401m000)

Use this session to verify whether you can safely remove a domain extension or safely reduce its length.

A failing "Convert to Runtime Data Dictionary" step can occur for several reasons. These are the two most common reasons, with regards to changes in a domain extension:

  1. A developer has reduced the length of an existing domain extension that is committed and at runtime still in use.

    This domain extension is at runtime still in use because the additional string length is used by field values.

  2. An administrator has to uninstall a PMC solution that contains a domain extension that is at runtime still in use.

    This domain extension is at runtime still in use because the additional string length is used by field values.

In both situations a warning message is now presented to the developer or administrator:
  1. When a developer reduces the length of an existing domain extension in the Extension Modeler, a warning is displayed to use the new validation session.
  2. When an administrator runs the "Check Solutions to Uninstall" run for a PMC solution that contains a domain extension, a report is generated.

    The report contains this warning to use the new validation session:

    To prevent truncation of table fields you may want to run ttext1401m000 (Validate Domain Extension)

    If you run the Validate Domain Extension (ttext1401m000) session, a report is generated with data that will be truncated for the domain extension.

    The report shows records with string fields that contain a text that is too long, compared to the predefined new maximum length.