FastReport Viewer

The main report viewing tool FastReport.Net is Viewer. This viewer has a rich toolkit for storing, exporting, printing, and other manipulations with a report. All this variety is very useful but not always necessary. For example, for users who only view and print reports export emailing is absolutely useless. Also, many people do not need a big list of available export reports. You just confused and lose time to find the right one. In such cases, we would like to leave only the necessary functionality for these users. And it can be done quite simply. This question also arose for the user of the Combit List & Label report generator. The report designer of FastReport .NET, as you know, also allows you to view the reports. To do this, he uses the same Viewer. And you can customize the list of available exports in the designer's settings. File-'Options-User Interface menu:   Exports Menu button opens the settings window for export display:   You can customize the display of both individual exports and the whole group. There's a Default Menu button to quickly restore your original settings. For example, we removed exports from the display to the PDF, Office, and XML format. And indeed, when we view the report, we will see that they are no longer on the list of exports:   But from the report designer we can only set up a list of exports. What about other controls? To do this, you'll have to use programming skills. When creating an app that will run reports, we can set the reviewer's menu settings. For example, this code: 1 2 3 4 5 Report report = new Report(); report.Load("App_Data/Master-Detail.frx"); report.Prepare(); FastReport.Utils.Config.PreviewSettings.Buttons = PreviewButtons.Print | PreviewButtons.Design; report.ShowPrepared();  Here we set the button display. To be precise  - we just name all the buttons to be displayed: Print and Design. As a result we get: Great result - nothing more. Besides the buttons also displays the page number in the input field. It cannot be removed, otherwise you won't be able to go to other pages without page navigation buttons. Now you can experiment a bit. If your application includes any logic for hiding / showing the controls in the preview, it will certainly be a useful opportunity to return everything to the initial form: Config.PreviewSettings.Buttons = PreviewButtons.All; You can go the other way and not list the buttons that should be displayed, but rather to list those that you want to exclude: Config.PreviewSettings.Buttons ^ = PreviewButtons.Email; At the same time, send e-mail button will disappear and the rest will be available. Of course, you can edit the list of available exports, by analogy with the above example. Also you can edit the export list through:  Config.PreviewSettings.Exports And you can edit the exports to the clouds: Config.PreviewSettings.Clouds

In addition to the libraries themselves, FastReport.Net also includes separate programs - Designer and Viewer. The first one, as you understand, is intended for creating and editing report templates. It has a report preview mode from which you can view the report, export it to the desired data format and send it to print. The Viewer is designed to view reports in fpx preview format. The report file in this format contains, besides the report template, also directly the data that will fill this report. That is, the * .fpx file is essentially a ready-to-view report. In terms of functionality, the Viewer is almost identical to the report preview mode in Designer. Actually, Designer compiles the report for viewing in fpx. Both of these programs have a graphical user interface. However, few people know that they can be run from the command line with parameters. Let's take a look at the way to work with Designer from the command line. - Firstly, you can start the program with the command: Designer.exe If, on the command line, the directory with installed FastReport.Net is selected, then you can limit yourself to this command. Otherwise, you need either to move to the desired directory using the CD command, or add the path to Designer.exe. - Secondly, you can open the report template in the designer using the command: Designer.exe Report.fpx Where Report.frx is the name of the report template. If it is not in the currently selected directory, then you need to specify the path to this file. By executing this command, you will see a designer with an open report template, i.e. you can immediately start editing the report. If the path to the designer or to the report template contains spaces in the directory names, then you need to quote it - “My reports / Report.frx”. - Thirdly - you can run the report immediately in preview mode: Designer.exe Report.frx /preview That is, you specify two parameters - the path to the report template and the key to start the preview mode. And now we will have look at the way to work with the Viewer program from the command line. - As in the case with the designer, you can simply launch the report viewer with the command: Viewer.exe Here you just need to specify the path to the executable file of the application. - Add parameter - path to the report file in * .fpx format: Viewer.exe Report.fpx Where Report.fpx is the file path. This command will launch the program with the loaded report. - And last, a new feature - the possibility of simple printing Viewer.exe Report.fpx /P That is, we specify the report file and key - start printing. At the same time, we will not be able to see the report viewer itself, but only the print form:   It remains to set the print settings and run it only. If you run Viewer.exe / P, the print dialog with the settings will open. After clicking on "Print", a window with a command line will be displayed, which can be used later for "silent" printing on a particular printer. It can be copied with Ctrl + C and used later.

Title of the article partly reveals subject. I would like to consider configuration a viewer PDF files when exporting FastReport .NET report. This can be Acrobat Reader or browser's built-in viewer (Edge, Chrome) or any other viewer. You'll find that some of the options are very useful. Here is the tab "View" window in PDF export settings:   Consider all the options in order: Show print dialog - when you start pdf file will immediately show the print dialog; Hide toolbar - disables the toolbar menu at the viewer; With the menu: Without the toolbar menu:  Hide menubar - includes a main menu in the viewer; With the main menu: Without the main menu: Hide window user interface - this option enables / disables the sidebar that displays document pages in miniature. Interface hidden: Fit window - it allows you to adjust the size of the document window so that the page of the document was placed in width. If the window is smaller than the width of the document page, it will be increased; Center window - this option allows you to center the Viewer window on the screen; Print scaling - allows you to compress the large pages. For example, the image on the entire page had fields (some printers may not print entirely on the entire sheet, they require field). If you select this option, in the print window of the PDF document you will see the selected item Shrink oversized pages.  Scale - the opportunity to ask the original display scale of the document. You can change it later, when viewing the document.   For example, choose the size of the "Fit Page". The scale will be chosen so that the entire page is fully displayed on the screen: Outline - allows you to display report the plan as a PDF file. Here is a sample report with a built-up: And here is the document PDF, if for such a report to include the option Outline: On the left is displayed bookmarks toolbar, which contains the report plan. We have considered all the options for configuring the display of the document in the viewer. Which of them will be useful to you to judge. But it is obvious that you shouldn't ignore these settings if you want to create a document that is easy to read the end-user.