Report Viewer 8.0 Rendering Issues in IE9 - c#-2.0

We've had created SSRS 2008 SQL Reports/Report Viewer 8.0 in a web app. As of IE9, the rendering of the report and handling of it within the report viewer changed drastically from our prior experience.
Thus, our once very nice looking functional app has suddenly turned into a something that looks amatuerish ... to be kind about it.
I need to fix this before our next release, and I was hoping someone had encountered at least some of these issues before and had some hints.
I first noticed the rendering problems in the venerable Report Viewer 8.0.0.0 that we had been relying on.
The major issue was a failure to respect the sizing of layouts, resulting in text wrapping and other undesired attempts by the renderer to display the report in a minimal shrunken space.
I decided that this was most likely because the aging ReportViewer didn't support more recent browsers.

Check if your reportviewer control in aspx page has following attributes
AsyncRendering="False"
SizeToReportContent="True"

Related

Preview the razor design without running the app

I am using Visual Studio 2019 to code Blazor. I find it really annoying that I have to run the app in order to see the screen design. Does anyone know if there's a WYSIWYG tool or feature, so that I can look at the screen design w/o running the app? Thanks!
So since there's known, I have been doing this way...and so far my productivity is higher than running the app. Since I am constructing smaller Razor components, I have been constructing the styling on Codeply and move the styling back to VS once it's confirmed working. Pretty similar to what Quango has suggested. Still wishing there's a WYSIWYG feature from VS.

Remove background image in crystal report upon print

I have this crystal report that I created and has a background image that I imported. When previewing it's okay that the image is visible. But upon printing I want that image not to be printed just the plain text/data is needed to be printed. It is possible to do it?.
I've search in google but the sample is different from my problem.
Thanks. New here. BTW I'm using asp.net c# mvc5, VS 2017.
Not possible 'out of the box'.
Using code you can print a different version of the rpt or mess around with suppress conditions...

Infragistics WebDatePicker: calendar dropdown broken in iOS

We're making a big web form for customers, and it's got half a dozen date fields, for which we are using the Infragistics WebDatePicker control (in asp.net 4.6). They work fine (though applying validators to them was a lot of work) except when we try them on an iPad. In Safari for iOS, tapping on the button to drop down the calendar causes it to flash momentarily and then disappear. No such problem on an android device, so far as we've seen. The problem isn't just on our new page, but on all our old ones that also use the control.
Edit: the problem happens in Safari but not in Chrome.
Has anybody encountered this? Has any work been put into resolving this issue? Or are we the only ones seeing it?
Googling seems to come up empty, and Infragistics' support request page appears to currently be inaccessible.
I'm hoping this doesn't come down to finding a way to instrument 50 javascript events on an ipad.
To update, here is the exact case where we're seeing the problem:
device: iPad Air 2 64gb (model MH2M2LL/A)
system: iOS 8.4.1
browser: Mobile Safari 600.1.4
infragistics version: 15.2 for asp.net 4.5
example site: http://www.infragistics.com/products/aspnet/editors/date-picker
...yup, it's failing in Infragistics' own demo page. (Use the second "view sample" link.)
It doesn't fail every time: sometimes the first click after page load succeeds, but the ones after it all fail.
Second update: Infragistics has entered this in their bug tracker as #216122.
I have tested this with the latest SR for 15.1 and could not reproduce the described issue. In order to receive better support, I suggest you to open a ticket for this issue trough the Infragistics site. What is more, it will be best if you add all the related environment details (like Infragistics product version you are using), and attach a simple code sample in order for the Infragistics Dev Support to reproduce the described behavior.

Desperately trying to make Watin work with IE

I have been working with Watin for about 1 week. I really wanted to make firefox work but had to give up after a day or so when seeing there was no way i could get jSSH working with Firefox 8 etc. Really wish there was a way of using Chrome or firefox i have to say
So returning reluctantly to IE I developed some automation software using Watin, however I have a persistent problem with Goto(href) where it seems as though the page never actually gets marked as complete. And although the browser navigates to the page and I can see the page fine, the call to Goto() just times out. After that point anything I try fails and it cant find the elements in the dom and I cant click anything programmatically. So I have to solve this timeout issue
I have read various articles suggesting fixes and have tried them all as far as I can see i.e. making sure I run as administrator, making sure that internet explorer enhanced security is switched off, etc.. I would really, really like to make Watin work - but right now I am about ready to give up and create a much, much simpler class with an embedded browser in my app. So stackoverflow is my last port of call. How can I stop Watin from timing out.
I am on Windows 7 Ultimate Version 6.1.7601 Service pack 1 build 7601
Visual Studio 2010
compiling as a .net 4.0 app
IE 9.0.8112.16421 with update KB2586448
I have a console app, no threads, [STAThread] on my Main entry point
This is my Visual Studio info:-
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Version 10.0.40219.1 SP1Rel
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 4.0.30319 SP1Rel
Microsoft Visual C# 2010 01021-532-2002102-70185
Any help will be very greatfully received.
Regards Julian
ok, so after many months of playing and fiddling the answer to my question has several parts.
Firstly. I needed to get Watin working properly as an embedded browser in a win32 application rather than as a console app. This required me to spend a huge amount of effort getting Watin embedded the way I wanted, I had problems with STATHREAD (of course), and the pop up dialog watcher, and getting the HWND of my browser into Watin to create its browser object (I used another sample on stack overflow to do this) and then I had to ensure ScriptErrorsSuppressed=true and I finally got it working. Hoorah
However, the problem I originally had all that time ago still seems to remain with Watin.2.1.0.1196 in dealing with frame sets on asda.com.
So I have just now done a svn checkout of the watin project and I am finally hoping that the latest updates I have seen will fix this problem once and for all... and Yes I am still really looking forward to Jeroen getting IE9 or indeed any other browser working with Watin. Working with IE (any flavour) sucks
WaTiN does not support IE9 fully yet as far as I know. Jeroen (the creator) is working on getting it fully compatible with IE9, but IE9 relies on new WPF components in regards to previous versions of IE, so i'm guessing this will take some work.
We suffered from several problems as well when we upgraded our WatiN tests to IE9. In the end we force our website to render everything to IE8 standards and set IE9 to IE8 rendering mode untill there is an update from watin to fully support IE9 with all its quirkcs and features.

Any good PDF export filter that works with Fast Report?

I recently discovered that the PDFs exported by the Fast Report's PDF export filter aren't displayed correctly in Mac OSX, iOS and Android devices.
Fast Report informed that their pdf implementation only support Windows and they can't say when the new implementation that they are working on will be available.
I also tried to use the Gnostice export filter, but their demo installer didn't work in Delphi XE and when I contacted them, they took 15 days to send me some attached dcus which also didn't work. So I'm searching for another option.
If you know or use a PDF export filter which works with Fast Report, please let me know.
November 2015: Fast Report now have PDF/A support, with this option enabled the PDFs are fine on all platforms.
October 2014 - Fast Report 5 still seems to generate "Windows-only" PDF. A production-ready solution for this problem would be a benefit for cross-platform developers, given that Fast Report is the report generator bundled with Delphi.
Here is a fresh example generated with the Fast Report 5 demo, displayed with Adobe Reader 11 on Android 4.4:
And on Windows:
Fast Report informed that their pdf implementation only support Windows and they can't say when the new implementation that they are working on will be available.
I'm not sure that should be taken literally, considering PDF is supposed to be a cross platform format. It more likely means they don't actually have the time, equipment or expertise to test with those platforms. The PDF export filter that I'm using is the one built into Fast Report! It surely has some bugs, but I managed to work around them. And I think that might also work for you: Start with a simple document that does export properly, start adding features until it brakes, then you know what brakes it and you'll know how to work around the problem.
From my experience, here's what got me into trouble:
Rounded corners in the PDF document didn't look like the ones in the Fast Report preview. My fix: Found a combination of settings that made the exported PDF look exactly like the preview document. For me rounded corners were just a cosmetic feature, and with cosmetics there's no "One Look"; The alternative worked just fine. This might actually be fixed in the most recent version, but I didn't bother changing the document to test.
Transparency issues and outline issues. When working with the Fast Report editor (and when looking at it's previews) it's easy to overlap objects. You don't see this because of the object opacity. When exporting to PDF overlapped objects somehow managed to "print" outlines, and it obviously looked ugly. My fix: pay closer attention to those objects, make sure they don't overlap or make sure they don't generate outlines if no outlines are supposed to be seen.
Also make sure you test using ADOBE Reader, on any of the given platforms. If it works with the Adobe reader but doesn't work with other readers, there might be a bug in the 3rd party reader!
Edit: Here (link) is a sample PDF document generated by my Fast Reports application. I have no idea what kinds of documents you generate, but in my book that's a mighty complex document. Notice the diagonal line that starts where the table data ends, notice the embedded images (bar code, stamp, signature).
I opened that document on the following mobile devices:
iPad, running iOS: The document renders 90% ok. Images are not rendered at all, but they're not important to my document (and that's very likely a problem with the iOS reader). All the fancy colored lines and rounded corners are properly rendered. Some text is not properly rendered, and I'm pretty sure that didn't render because the "box" that contains it is too small for the contents. That most likely happens because I didn't embed the TTF fonts into the PDF and the Apple font on iOS didn't perfectly match the Microsoft font that was used on Windows.
Samsung Galaxy S2, running Android 2.3: The document renders 100% correctly.
Samsung Something(??), running Windows Mobile 6.5 and the FoxReader: The document is totally gibberish: pictures showed up but the spacing between letters was messed so bad it's impossible to read. I blame the reader, it's not Acrobat and it probably wanted to be "smart". And it broke it's teeth in my text encoding, because my text is not English.
About the PDF format: A document is "PDF" if it conforms to the standard, here's some Wikipedia info on that. In theory a PDF document should render exactly the same way any way you look at it, but there are forces at play that might work against this:
Not all readers are "Adobe Acrobat". In theory they're all compatible, in practice they're most like not 100% compatible.
PDFs that don't embed fonts depend on the fonts available on the host system. If they're not the exact same fonts there's trouble ahead, because they might have slightly differing sizes. Since we're talking about PDF's that were generated on Windows and opened on iOS or Android, those are obviously different platforms and they're guaranteed to use different fonts (because fonts are licensed, and I doubt Microsoft will licence it's fonts to Apple. I also doubt Apple would want Microsoft fonts). One possible solution is embedding fonts, but that makes your PDF files significantly larger.
AFAIK you can export your Fast Report pages as metafiles (i.e. vectorial Windows format, which is in fact a raw serialization of GDI commands).
Then you could be able to render those metafiles into PDF using our Open Source SynPDF library. It works from Delphi 5 up to XE, is Unicode ready, can embed true type fonts, and even create PDF/A files.
It is also able to export metafiles included in reports as vectorial pictures (and not bitmaps), and could therefore highly increase the pdf quality and at the same time shrink its size.
See for instance how it can be used for QuickReport. A similar technical should be used with Fast Report.
The Gnostice support answered my e-mail which I reported that their trial installer didn't work and send me some tips about which could be the problem and I was able to install it.
The company I work for already bought me a license and I already replaced the Fast Report Export Filter, which was a task as simple as droping 2 components on the same Form as the frxReport Object and setting 2 or 3 properties.
Also, to export the report programatically was also 2 lines of code and the information was easily found in their FAQ.
In the end, based on the recomendations and after looking for other options just to find abandoned components which doesn't have any updates for years, the Gnostice eDocEngine was the best solution.
Just hope they make their installer a little more "Programmer Friendly" as if it had complained about the lack of Fast Report's units in the search path I would've been able to at least have an idea of what was going on, instead of just getting an error and blaming them for having a trial installer which didn't work.
After replacing the filter and generating the PDF's using the eDocEngine component, the PDFs now work the same in iOS, OSX and Android.
Here is my workaround solution. It's not an universal one, but helped me in my case.
The main idea: use in report font with small file size (I've found Arial-like font with cyrillic charset with size 57kb). So the exported files can be 100-200 kb.
Details is here:
http://dev-doc.blogspot.com/2013/03/fastreport-4-font-reading-and-huge-file.html
I use wPDF from WPcubed components, it's really a great product, good value for money
You can always install one of the PDF printers. These are in fact PDF convertors that install as windows printer. They work from any application including FastReprt components - just print on them.

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