Summary and plans
We could talk a lot about our experiences and difficulties in the past year, but we'll just take stock of this year and talk a little bit about our plans for the future.
In spite of all the difficulties, we worked hard this year. Not everything we planned has been completed, but we are committed to achieving all of our goals for the foreseeable future.
What's done?
Over the past year we were able to implement new quality control processes for our products. Work in this direction will continue. We have optimized and improved exports to various formats, added new object properties, improved report generation algorithms and fixed many bugs. We have added support for 5 new barcodes and 6 new formats for saving documents.
We want to acknowledge the hard work our developers did to refactor the code to merge the .NET family source code into a common repository.
In addition, in FastReport NET we added Windows Forms support for .NET Core 3.1 and support for .NET 5, introduced security control of the report script when working in web applications, and developed a new demo application. Also we deprecated .NET Framework 2.0 support in the FastReport NET product. The FastReport Mono gained the ability to build charts.
We added support for new RAD Studio in FastReport VCL, did a lot of work to improve the user interface, added new features to build complex reports, and improved the quality of generated reports. Separately we note the work on improving the product FastReport for Lazarus. In turn, FastReport FMX has gained the ability to work in 64-bit apps under macOS operating system, the report designer has been improved as well as work on data processing and document generation.
OLAP FastCube .NET product can be used in ASP.NET Core web-applications now, it has an improved interface, new possibilities of data filtering were added and it works in Mono. FastCube VCL got expression support, it works better in Lazarus. In FastCube FMX new options for data highlighting were added.
We want to thank all FastReport Open Source users, those who contributed to its improvement and those who wrote to us with their issues.
What's next?
Our analysts together with the entire team closely follow trends in software development and the entire IT industry. We are constantly learning and trying to improve our products according to our customers' wishes.
Let's start with the FastReport VCL and FMX product plans:
- we want to release FastReport VCL 7;
- the tables in the reports will be improved;
- PDF documents will get digital signing capabilities;
- reports will be able to use SVG images;
- new transports will be added;
- the Lazarus version will get a RichView object;
- new interface styles will be added.
The FastReport .NET product will get:
- support for high-resolution screens (high dpi);
- components to work with the Blazor framework;
- support for the new .NET 6;
- digital signatures for MS Office documents;
- parallel printing on multiple printers;
- ability to connect to the Clickhouse column based DB.
FastReport Mono cross-platform report generator will become even more compatible with different operating systems - we plan to improve stability and performance of this product.
Browser-based report editor FastReport Online Designer will be added support for editing charts, new report objects, improved user interface.
Work on improvement of the FastCube user interface will be continued, also it is planned to expand its capabilities to connect to different DB.
It is planned to release a new product for generating reports and launch its closed beta-testing. You can take part in it. Just follow our news.
We also plan to update and publish documentation for all our products. We also plan to introduce a subscription-based licensing model for those products which haven't used it yet.
Good luck in the new 2021!
We want to wish you good and positive emotions in the coming year 2021! May your programs be bug-free and your reports always complete and timely! May your DB queries run fast, and may users' requests to you for new features not hamper you! And let the suppliers of libraries for your products fulfill your requests quickly! In any case - we'll do our best for you!
We always welcome your requests - write us your wishes about our products, and we'll try to fulfill them!
With respect,
Fast Reports team
