What's new in NetAdvantage Suite 2005 Volume 2

NetAdvantage 2005 Volume 2
NetAdvantage is the complete toolset for rapidly building the presentation layer of your commercial class Windows Forms, ASP.NET & Tablet PC applications. NetAdvantage 2005 Volume 2 includes all the presentation layer development tools that you need to deliver consistent applications to your end users on a timely basis.

NetAdvantage is the complete toolset for rapidly building the presentation layer of your commercial class Windows Forms, ASP.NET & Tablet PC applications. NetAdvantage 2005 Volume 2 includes all the presentation layer development tools that you need to deliver consistent applications to your end users on a timely basis.

Grids, charts, toolbars, menus, listbars, trees, tabs, explorer bars, editors, designers and more!

In-demand features brought to you with this release include: Windows Forms Tree featuring data bound and multi-column data binding support; Row Layout Designer, Fixed Row Support, fixed and Group By Summaries, XSD Schema Support, Runtime Appearance Presets as well as numerous other enhancements to the functionality in WinGrid were made; WinTabbedMDIManager now features Horizontal and Vertically Nested Tab Groups; our ASP.NET Grid adds support for Fire Fox and Non-Indented Hierarchy with this release; the number of assemblies in both the Win & Web Chart were reduced from two to one, and the charts also include Smart Axis Labels, Axis Margins, Designer & Wizard Enhancements, Data Interpolation, and New Chart Types: Stacked Area, Concentric Doughnut, and Pareto.

Windows Forms

WinGrid
WinTabbedMDIManager
WinChart
WinTree

ASP.NET

WebGrid
WebChart

Windows Forms

WinGrid

Extend Last Column To Fill Grid
With the latest release you can now choose to size only the last column to fit the grid rather than sizing all the columns equally. The AutoFit – Extend Last Column feature now offers a different autofit mode where the last visible column is resized to fit the visible area instead of resizing all the columns.

XSD Schema Support
Easily use XML Schema Definition (XSD) to apply constraints on what data the end users of your application can enter into the grid. WinGrid now has the ability to apply constraints on the data it contains by reading in those constraints from an XML Schema Definition (XSD). The constraints apply to both the Bands and the Columns of the grid. Band-level constraints involve the number of rows allowed in the band. Column-level constraints involve restrictions on the data allowed in cells of a column.

RegexPattern Added to Column Class
Easily gain an expanded ability to constrain data in a column using the Regular ExpressionEditor. Grid column data can now be constrained based on a given regular expression. This regular expression is either extracted from an XSD schema, or provided by you manually. In order to assist you in creating the correct regular expression for a column, the new UITypeEditor has been assigned to the ‘RegexPattern’ property. This design-time feature allows you to test regular expressions against arbitrary test data and view the results of the test. This new class, RegexUITypeEditor, has been added to the Win assembly and allows other controls to leverage it in the future.

Row Layout Designer
Rapidly develop RowLayouts with ease. Design and save a Band’s RowLayout with a new easy to use and intuitive Drag and Drop Designer interface. Columns are dragged and dropped in the grid designer to and from a sortable list of available columns; as well as within the RowLayout itself. Adorners allow intuitive resizing of Column and Row Spans. The new Office2003 look and feel, expanded design surface, extensive Tool Tip Help, and at-hand Context Menu and KeyBoard commands are all designed to make the task of designing the WinGrid’s RowLayout easy, intuitive, logical, and feature rich.

Fixed Row Support
Define a specific row to be viewable at all times. The Fixed Rows feature allows you to fix (freeze) rows on the top or the bottom allowing the grid to be scrolled vertically with the fixed rows remaining in view. Fixed rows are supported in root bands as well as child bands.

Fixed Summary On Top or Bottom
With Win Grids new capability to display summaries in a fixed area either at the top or bottom of the column headers, you can keep summaries in view at all times and leverage the ability to show your summaries at the top of the page. This feature is supported in root and child bands and works in a similar fashion as the fixed rows feature.

Summaries In GroupBy Rows
Make your applications more visually appealing using the summary cells in the new GroupBy Rows functionality. WinGrid additionally extends this functionality by showing summaries in GroupBy rows aligned with columns. Now it also supports the ability to display summary footers of GroupBy row collections. Previously summaries were displayed in the GroupBy rows by appending the summaries to the GroupBy description text.

Fixed Filter Row Support
Filter Row is a fixed row in the column headers area used for filtering rows. Filter Row functionality lets you provide end users with a row that can be used for direct input of filter conditions.

SpecialRowSeparator
Gain greater control over the look of the separator between areas in WinGrid. The SpecialRowSeparatorUIElement provides a UIElement for separating headers, filter row, fixed add-row, fixed summary footer, fixed rows, and non-fixed rows from each other.

GroupBy Row Indentation
With this new feature, you can now specify the indentation for the GroupBy rows in a particular band.

GroupBy Row Expansion Indicator Indentation
Determine the distance between the edge of a row and the row’s expansion indicator with this new feature. This feature also allows you to specify a pixel offset for the expansion indicator of a band’s GroupBy rows. Using this functionality in conjunction with the new GroupBy Row Indentation feature, you can have all of a band’s GroupBy rows flush against the left edge of the control, and allow the relative positions of the GroupBy row expansion indicators to depict the nested relationships of these groups.

GroupBy Expansion Options
Specify how GroupBy rows are expanded by the end-user. This feature provides you with an array of options to perform this task. The first is to use the current default technique, which is to toggle a GroupBy row via an expansion indicator or a double click on the row itself. Another option is to remove the expansion indicator and only allow the end-user to double click on the GroupBy row. A third option is to disable the expansion functionality altogether.

Hide Grid Caption
By setting the CaptionVisible property to “hide” or “show” you can now easily specify whether the Grid displays a caption area.

Select All Cell Text On Edit
Specify whether clicking on a cell puts the cell into edit mode and selects the text in the cell. This new feature lets you develop a better heads down editing system with WinGrid.

Ability To Show Row Numbers in Row Selectors
Display row numbers for your users in row selectors. By setting the WinGrid’s override RowSelectorNumberStyle property, row numbers can be based on the filter rows (visible rows), all rows, or the order in which the rows occur in the underlying IBindingList.

“Click Here To Add Row” Text Property
Instruct users on how to enter text in the add-row by adding a prompt that is displayed in the template add-row by setting the Override’s TemplateAddRowPrompt property.

HeaderStyle and RowSelectorStyle Properties
We now allow you to specify the visual appearance of column headers and row selectors. This gives you the ability to change the visual appearance of more areas of the WinGrid than ever before.

New DoubleClick Events For Row, Cell, Header, Etc.
Quickly code against double-click events for UIElements rather than spending time on determining which UIelement was clicked on.

ButtonStyle Property
Develop a full featured user interface by controlling the look of all WinGrid buttons. The ButtonStyle property permits you to specify the visual appearance of buttons in the Grid. The buttons affected by this property are those found in cells and in the AddNew box.

ApplyPreset Methods
Easily apply a preset at runtime with either the ApplyPresetFromXML or ApplyPresetFromBinary method. These methods can be called at runtime with the appropriate file.

Wrap Text In Headers
Now you no longer have to insert line breaks into captions to display multiple lines. Column headers will automatically wrap caption text and increase the header height to fit the caption.

ColumnLoadStyle Added to Grid Layout Object
This property provides you with the ability to define a data structure at design-time (or at runtime) and then bind to a data source that has more columns and bands while having the new columns and automatically hidden. This enables you to easily define how the grid displays columns and bands in a data source.

New Default Look
When working with WinGrid at design-time, the grid will automatically take on a new, more modern look and feel. This look and feel is specified in a Preset file. You can specify a Preset to apply to all new WinGrid’s created at design time. This option is available in the WinGrid designer.

GroupBy Break Behavior
Effortlessly use this new feature to specify how the grid creates GroupBy rows based on the data in a column. A great way to provide customized grouping behavior.

Support For Or’ing Filters Instead of And’ing
The LogicalOperator property on the ColumnFiltersCollection can now be set to “OR” to perform a logical or operation between the column filters. This gives you the ability to filter out rows if it fails all column filters.

AllowRowLayoutColMoving
Provide an enhanced user experience enabling the end user of your application to reposition columns at runtime. With the AllowRowLayoutColMoving property which was added to the GridOverride, users at runtime now have the ability to reposition columns via drag and drop when the grid is in RowLayout mode.

AllowRowLayoutCellSpanSizing and AllowRowLayoutLabelSpanSizing
New AllowRowLayoutCellSpanSizing and AllowRowLayoutLabelSpanSizing enable users to pad-and-resize labels and/or cells in RowLayout mode. This gives users additional control over the layout at runtime.

WinTabbedMDIManager

Nested Tab Groups
WinTabbedMDIManager layout functionality has been extended to allow the creation of nested groups. This provides a flexible addition to WinTabbedMDIManager enabling you to provide advanced ability to nest multiple tabs.

TabActivated Events
With this new feature, you can easily detect when an active tab has changed.

Maximize
An AllowMaximize property has been added to determine whether the user may change the IsActiveTabGroupMaximized property. When set to true, the context menus for tabs in that group will include an additional checkable menu option – Maximize. This feature gives you the ability to maximize an MDITabGroup so only the contents of the maximized tab group are displayed.

WinChart

Consolidation of Chart assemblies to achieve AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers Attribute for WinChart
The number of assemblies has been reduced from two to one for both WebChart and WinChart.
The reduction of assemblies allows WinChart to be deployed in a no-touch deployment scenario without setting up special permissions on the file system, IIS, and the machine security policy.

Wizard Popup
The Chart Wizard automatically opens when a developer first drags a control onto a form. By automatically displaying the Chart Wizard, you are assisted in quickly creating a chart with less effort.

Chart Wizard Updates
Find the Chart Wizard easier to use when creating more of the standard chart features. We have added Axes Tabs to the wizard helping you in defining margins, extent, strip lines/grid lines, and range.

Customizable Axis Margins
The AxisAppearance class maintains a new margin property enabling you to set where axis labels appear. This property provides a way of specifying the margin on the near/or far sides on any axis, values can be specified as Percentage, Data Values, or Pixels.

Interpolation
Through two new properties, InterpolateSimple and InterpolateCustom, we provide you with flexible methods to handle null data values and how they are drawn in various chart types. Furthermore, we provide appearance properties under Data.EmptyAppearance, allowing you to customize how the chart draws values which have been interpolated.

Stacked Charts
With the addition of four new Stacked Area charts, you now have more choices for data display. New chart types include - Area (2D) chart, Stacked Line (2D) chart, Stacked Spline Area (2D) chart, Stacked 100% Spline (2D) chart.

Smart Axis Labels
Give your chart better looking axis labels and smarter range calculations. Instead of only using the data minimum and maximum as the axis minimum and maximum, you can now use the AxisTickStyle.Smart property in which round numbers are calculated below the minimum and above the maximum. Smarter intervals are used to calculate round numbers that are a factor of the data minimum and maximum.

Pareto (2D) Chart
Pareto charts are column charts sorted by value (greatest to smallest) and accompanied by a line showing the running total as a percentage of the set. The Y-axis shows the data values which correspond to the columns and the Y2-axis shows the percentage values which correspond to the line. This chart is used in quality control, and is most commonly meant to illustrate the "80/20 rule." For example, "80% of problems can usually be tracked to 20% of sources," or, "80% of sales come from 20% of products."

Concentric Doughnut (2D) Chart
Define a Doughnut with concentric rings when your data requires it.

Tabbed ChartType Property Editor
Experience improved design-time now that Tabs are used to organize the 34 chart types available for you to choose from.

WinTree

Multi-Column Tree With Data Binding Support
WinTree now supports columns in several basic styles. These new styles, capabilities, multi-column, and data binding support provide more features in the WinTree enabling you to meet the demands of new UI metaphors.

Outlook Express Style
This style is typically used where you have homogenous data with a recursive relationship. In this style, all of the rows of data are the same type within a single band and across all bands. Additionally, there is only one visible set of column headers at the top of the tree. If any row of data does not use the same set of columns, then those columns will display as cells in the column with a VisiblePosition matching their own. Columns without a matching visible column will not be displayed.

Grid Style
This style is typically used to display hierarchical data when the data is not recursive. In Grid style, the data is displayed in a hierarchy where the rows in each bands are different types. In this style, each collection of nodes in the tree display different columns or no columns.

FreeForm Style
This final style is completely free form. Each Override in the tree can have a completely different set of columns (or no columns). This means that even individual nodes within the same collection can display different data and different columns. With this style, every node in the tree will display its own set of column headers.

ASP.NET

WebGrid

FireFoxSupport
Deploy Web sites with WebGrid and ensure that your data is displayed properly to users browsing with FireFox.

Non-indented Hierarchy
This freshly added feature permits you to define the increment that hierarchical rows are indented.

Remove/Insert Rows on Client With Server Handling
Insert and remove rows in the grid on the client with server handling.

WebChart

Consolidation of Chart assemblies to achieve AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers Attribute forWebChart
The number of assemblies has been reduced from two to one for both WinChart and WebChart. The reduction of assemblies allows WebChart to be deployed in a no-touch deployment scenario without setting up special permissions on the file system, IIS, and the machine security policy.

Customizable Axis Margins
TheAxisAppearance class maintains a new margin property enabling you to set where axis labels appear. This property provides a way of specifying the margin on the near/or far sides on any axis, values can be specified as Percentage, Data Values, or Pixels.

Pareto (2D) Chart
Pareto charts are column charts sorted by value (greatest to smallest), and accompanied by a line showing the running total as a percentage of the set. The Y-axis shows the data values which correspond to the columns and the Y2-axis shows the percentage values which correspond to the line. This chart is used in quality control, and is most commonly meant to illustrate the "80/20 rule." For example, "80% of problems can usually be tracked to 20% of sources," or, "80% of sales come from 20% of products."

Concentric Doughnut (2D) Chart
Define a Doughnut with concentric rings when your data requires it.

Tabbed ChartType Property Editor
Experience improved design-time now that Tabs are used to organize the 34 chart types available for you to choose from.

NetAdvantage 2005 Volume 1 includes an array of new features and enhancements driven by requests made by our developer and enterprise customers. This release offers key improvements directed at both the Windows Forms and ASP.NET controls as well as extending Section 508 Compliance to additional controls in the toolset.

In-demand features brought to you with this release include:

Windows Forms Printing featuring PrintPreview
MergedCell functionality in WinGrid
MonthViewMulti and MonthViewSingle as well as CalendarCombo for WinSchedule
new Gantt and Polar chart types
and the ability to add annotations and one step visual effects and textures in both Win and WebChart.

WinPrinting (featuring PrintPreview)

The WinPrinting element includes two new controls: PrintPreviewControl and PrintPreviewThumbnail. The PrintPreviewControl includes a superset of the functionality of the WinPrintingControl. The PrintPreviewThumbnail control is used in conjunction with the PrintPreviewControl to provide a thumbnail view of the generated pages similar to the thumbnails you might see in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat.

WinGroupBox

The WinGroupBox consists of two controls, ExpandableGroupBox and GroupBox. Both of the new GroupBox controls will have the ability to show their header (which includes the caption, image, and expansion indicator (ExpandableGroupBox)).The ExpandableGroupBox is collapsible. When the control is collapsed, all of its child controls will be hidden from view and the control’s size will decrease.

WinToolBars – TaskPane

The TaskPane is a custom toolbar that is designed to display the content area for one item in a list of items. The TaskPane functionality in WinToolbarsManager allows the developer to build applications that provide the same user experience found in Microsoft Office.

WinGrid

Merged Cell
WinGrid now contains the MergedCell feature which allows you to merge consecutive cells with the same values so they appear as one cell. Only the cells from the same column are merged. Now you can display data in WinGrid in this popular format that presents information with less repetition.

CardView Scrolling
With the 2005 Volume 1 release of NetAdvantage WinGrid supports vertical scrolling of the card view area. With this enhanced functionality a vertical scrollbar is displayed on the right-hand side of the card area. This provides the ability to scroll up or down and bring any part of the card into view. Scrolling in CardView allows you to use the maximum amount of grid space in your application.

GridPrintDocument
This control provides the same functionality as the Print/PrintPreview methods of the Grid but also uses external elements that can interact with a System.Drawing.Printing.PrintDocument class, including the new PrintPreviewControl. This now gives you the ability to perform more user-friendly printing interface tasks with the new PrintPreviewControl.

IDataErrorInfo
IDataErrorInfo interface is a .NET databinding related interface for providing error information to the data bound controls. Typically, data row objects (like .NET DataRowView) implement this interface. Bound controls query this interface to get row and cell error information. With this new functionality displaying IDataErrorInfo in WinGrid you are able to reproduce a popular feature that is available in the in-box grid.

Sorting, Filtering, & Column resizing in Combo and Dropdown
WinCombo and WinDropdown now support sorting, column sizing, and filtering by the end users of your applications. The following events are available:

FilterRow
BeforeSortChange/AfterSortChange
BeforeColPosChanged/AfterColPosChanged
BeforeRowFilterDropDown
BeforeRowFilterChanged/AfterRowFilterChanged
BeforeCustomRowFilterDialog
BeforeRowFilterDropDownPopulate

Provide your users with advanced user interface functions that were previously only available in the WinGrid.

LimitToList property for Combo
The LimitToList property will limit typing to items specified on the list. Three methods have been added to the Combo control: a LimitToList property, an ItemNotInList event, and an overloaded IsItemInList.

ButtonsLeft & ButtonsRight properties for Combo
With the present release the Combo control has two new properties: ButtonsLeft and ButtonsRight. These properties allow you to add editor buttons to the left and right side of the text area, respectively.

Synchronous Sorting and Filtering
A ProcessMode event argument property has been added to the BeforeSortChangeEventArgs and BeforeRowFilterChangedEventArgs objects that are passed to the BeforeSortChange and BeforeRowFilterChanged events. The ProcessMode property specifies whether all rows, or all expanded rows, will be sorted synchronously. Overloaded EnsureSortedAndFiltered methods have been added to provide fine control over synchronous sorting. Use these additional event arguments and the overloaded methods to provide fine control over sorting.

Before/After Expand/Collapse Event for compressed card view
BeforeCardCompressedStateChanged and AfterCardCompressedStateChanged events fire before and after a Card Row is Expanded/Compressed in CardCompressedView. The event arguments for these methods specify the new compressed state of the Card Row and provide a reference to the row itself. The BeforeCardCompressedStateChanged is cancelable. This means you can now handle when a card view is compressed with these additional events.

RowSelectorHeaderStyle and Appearance
RowSelectorHeaderStyle and RowSelectorHeaderAppearance properties have been added to the Override object. The RowSelectorHeaderStyle determines the look and position of the area above Row Selectors if Row Selectors are visible. This control also gives you the ability to set the properties to None, ExtendFirstColumn, and SeperateElement. With the added functionality in this control you will find it easy to change the appearance and style of Row Selectors.

Resize column without using header
Instantly resize columns using the right border of the cells in non-row-layout mode. We also added a ColumnSizingArea property on the override. Now you can resize columns without using a header.

Prevent scrolling to active row after grid sort
When sorting, the FirstRow of the scroll region was maintained. Now, the scroll position of the scrollbar is maintained as well. The grid will no longer scroll to the active row after a sort.

Hide a column’s header in row layout mode
Hide headers and cells in row-layout functionality. Setting LabelPosition (on a column’s RowLayoutColumnInfo) to None will hide the header; setting it to LabelOnly will hide the cells of that column.

WinSchedule

LogicalDayOffset and LogicalDayDuration properties are implemented in the CalendarInfo control. DayView, WeekView/MonthViewSingle, and MonthViewMulti functionality was also added to WinSchedule in this release.

WinEditors

A LimitToList property, an ItemNotInList event, and overloaded IsItemInList methods have been added to the ComboEditor. This now allows you to limit any text entry to a list. Also added to WinEditors is a SpinWrap option in spin buttons which indicates whether the control’s spin button should wrap its value was added. Now you can have a spin button wrap to a min or max value instead of stopping. A visual overflow indicator in text editors giving you full control of what the text area looks like when text is larger than the area is an additional new option featured in WinEditors in this release.

WinChart

Gantt and Polar chart types; and the ability to add annotations and one step visual effects and textures were added to the already extensive list of WinChart’s capabilities. With the addition of annotations visual cues can be added to any area of the chart. One step visual effects gives you the unique capability to implement advanced imaging to your advanced charts. While Series/Item based appearances let you control the look of a single series or item in a chart.

Section 508 Accessibility

Section 508 compliance is imperative when building applications for that need to be accessible for the estimated 800,000 visually impaired persons currently using the Web. If you are currently developing applications for a United States Federal agency, accessibility is a requirement of your application und Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. In our latest release we added our DropDownButton, Button, Label, and WinSchedule to the long list of elements in the NetAdvantage toolset that meet Section 508 compliance requirements.

ASP.NET

Display Row Number on Row Selector

Now you can format the WebGrid to display row numbers at the beginning of every row in the grid. The new DisplayLayout.AllowRowNumberingDefault property determines whether the WebGrid will render row numbers on the RowSelectors, and if so, which numbering schema it will use. The new DisplayLayout.EnableClientSideRenumbering property allows you to set whether or not row renumbering will be done on the client side. The new Band.AllowRowNumbering property gives you control on how WebGrid will render row numbers and which schema will be used. Hyperlink Cell

Jump directly to a URL from a cell in WebGrid when you use the new TargetURL property off the cell object. This property allows you to set a URL for individual cells. If the property is set, the cell text is rendered as a hyperlink.

Paging Section Customization

Gain expanded control over the paging section format and give the users of your application more page viewing options. With the new PagingSection option the Pattern property has been extended to include new patterns with the existing set:

[prev] is the link to the previous page
[next] is the link to the next page
[page:N:text] is the link to page N. N can be the page number or words 'first', 'prev', 'next' or 'last'

UpdateRow and UpdateRowBatch Events

Use the new UpdateRow and UpdateRowBatch events to control updates at row level rather than at cell level. The events are fired after all cells in the current row are updated. If LoadOnDemand.Xml is used, only the UpdateRow event is fired for every updated row (no individual cell updates any more). If the row is updated on the server, new information is sent back to the client.

ClientResponse Property and XMLHTTPResponse Event

Provide greater control in the client with these new features that give you the ability to feedback the client side during the out-of-band call back. The new ClientResponse property off the grid object contains a reference to the XmlHTTPResponse object. When used during an out-of-band post back, its properties become available within the new XmlHTTPResponse event on the client from the Grid.XmlResponseObject property.

WebImageButton (Part of WebDataInput)

The WebImageButton control is designed as a replacement for the Microsoft-supplied Button control. It provides additional features such as rounded corners, presets, appearances, and AccessKeys.

WebPanel and WebGroupBox

The WebPanel control is designed as a replacement for the Microsoft in-box Panel control. Its primary advantage over the traditional Panel control is that the WebPanel is collapsible, either programmatically or via the user interface. It comes with full support for “~/” in all images for both the WebPanel and the WebGroupBox. All images, including style.BackgroundImage properties, can now be specified using the special ‘~’ character as shorthand for the application root.

WebSchedule

Use the new EnableKeyboardNaviagation property to allow users to naviagate the the WebCalendar control. Keyboard support allows users to use Tab Keys and Arrow Key to navigate into, through, and out of the WebCalendar control.

WebChart

Gantt and Polar chart types; and the ability to add annotations and one step visual effects and textures were added to the already extensive list of WebChart’s capabilities. With the addition of annotations visual cues can be added to any area of the chart. One step visual effects gives you the unique capability to implement advanced imaging to your advanced charts. While Series/Item based appearances let you control the look of a single series or item in a chart.

Section 508 Accessibility

Section 508 compliance is imperative when building applications for that need to be accessible for the estimated 800,000 visually impaired persons currently using the Web. If you are currently developing applications for a United States Federal agency, accessibility is a requirement of your application und Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. In our latest release we added our WebChart’s Tag Support element to the long list of elements in the NetAdvantage toolset that meet Section 508 compliance requirements.

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