I started looking at migrating some of our legacy reports to the new integrated report designer (Ignition 7.8.2). However, I have encountered some issues which prevent me from doing this at the moment.
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Layout is not preserved well when converting a legacy report. We have two “layers” of components which need to line up but they do not after conversion. The layer with the text content takes up too much vertical space and is being expanded off the bottom of the page. My suspicion is it’s a text sizing issue causing wrapping when it shouldn’t (although none of the text is visibly wrapped - it feels like it’s creating empty lines underneath).
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Images are corrupted when converted from legacy reports (the image is visible, but appears overlayed with a stretched version of itself). This only affects some of our legacy reports and I cannot work out why. They all use the same image. Possibly this is related to point 4.
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Property bindings (esp. visibility bindings) are not imported from legacy reports.
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For many reports the imported pages are invisible. They show up in the design tab, but in the preview and on the live system they are completely invisible (just the grey background). I haven’t managed to work out what’s causing this. Pages added using the new interface appear correctly.
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Legacy reports do not import newlines within text. They seem to be getting stripped out for some reason.
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Default property values are not imported from legacy reports, causing lots of “missing default value expression” errors. For a legacy report with lots of dataset properties this is particularly horrible when combined with point 7…
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The only default value which can be set for a dataset property is null. The best workaround I have found for this is to use a script that either copies the data to another property, or if it is null, copies a static CSV.
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Cannot use ctrl-select in the component tree to pick out multiple items.
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Selecting an item in the component tree does not enable cut/copy/paste options. You have to click on the item in the main window (which could be difficult if the component is obscured).
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There is no right-click menu for items in the component tree. At the very least, cut/copy/paste/delete would be nice here. Similarly, there is no right-click menu for components in the main window.
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Images are not easy to add. I had to consult the documentation to find out that I had to drag-and-drop them in. It would be much more obvious to have an image-selection property, just like images do in normal Ignition windows. And a right-click menu with a “select image” option.
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Cannot select images from the image browser.
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Copy-pasting an image from the legacy report designer results in XML text instead of an image.
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Deleting a report causes the component/resource tree to completely collapse.
There are some very hazardous issues with a lack of undo:
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Undo is cleared when going to the preview pane.
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Missing undo for changes to data parameters.
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There is no revert option for report resources!!!
Overall the new report designer shows great promise. I can already see that it’s going to be much much better than the old one, but some of these issues do need to be resolved first.
Thanks.
