I was excited when presented with the opportunity to test ComponentOne's collection
of .NET Windows Form controls included in the Studio for WinForms suite. What’s
great about ComponentOne is that they have been providing some of the most well-known
grids for Windows Client apps, FlexGrid and TrueDBGrid, since 1991. With that
longevity, you know that their controls will stand the test of time and evolve
along with market trends.
The Studio offers over 65 .NET Windows Forms controls, in some instances extending
what is “in the box” and in others providing controls you can’t get anywhere
else. ComponentOne Studio for WinForms controls include code-free designers,
built-in features, like the ability to replicate popular interfaces as seen in
Microsoft Office, and awesome flexibility. The Studio comes with controls like
Chart, Ribbon, FlexGrid, Scheduler, Reports, and True DBGrid.
As you read on you’ll see this product earned high remarks and we decided to hold
a drawing so that one of our readers would have a chance to win a Free License
of ComponentOne Studio for WinForms. Be sure you are logged in as an eggheadcafe.com
member and click the entry banner to be automatically entered in the drawing
As a developer, you invest in a third party control suite (or get your employer to
do so) for several reasons:
• First, because it provides controls with functionality that you need in order to
develop better applications in less time.
• Second, because it can be significantly less expensive to purchase the control
suite than to devote the many hours of development time that would be necessary
to provide the needed functionality.
• And third, because the professional look and feel of a control suite enhances the
usability and performance of your applications. Having reviewed ComponentOne's
Studio for WinForms controls, it's my opinion that the suite meets all three
criteria
One really strong suit for ComponentOne's Studio for WinForms controls is it's
all-in-one reporting solution, which has a rich object model for generating reports,
several UI controls for previewing, and a report designer for creating and designing
reports. Reports for WinForms is pretty much an all-in-one reporting solution.
You can generate professional looking, well-behaved reports for your applications.
You can even integrate your existing reporting solutions (SQL Server, Access,
Crystal) into your applications.
I used the report designer to create a custom report based on some tables in the
trusty Northwind database with no trouble at all. You can drag fields onto your
report designer surface and easily design custom reports exactly to your liking.
I generated a Grouped-by-Country Sales report from Northwind in a matter of seconds,
from a stored procedure. These can then be either printed, or exported to other
programs such as Excel, PDF, Html, RTF, Text, and XML Paper Specification:
Here's another custom report I did with a C1 Chart control added. You can see
my Bromberg IPA and Ultra Bock are doing well:
The C1Chart control offers a wide range of features and makes it relatively easy
to create really stunning color charts of just about any type. Here's one
I did using the OpenHighLowClose bar chart style for a stock:
C1Report provides a rich object model for creating, customizing, loading, and saving
report definitions. Whether you need to generate reports with barcodes, charts,
etc., or render reports directly to a printer or preview control it is possible
using C1Report. You can also modify existing SQL Server SSRS reports or even
create new reports completely in code using the C1RdlReport component
People often ask about importing, and with ComponentOne’s control you can import
Access report files (MDB) and Crystal report files (RPT) using the C1ReportDesigner
application. The C1ReportDesigner uses a banded report model for a highly organized
and familiar layout. You can create complex hierarchical documents with automatic
word index, TOC generation, data binding, and more with C1PrintDocument.
Controls that come with the C1Report features include:
C1Report Component : The C1Report component generates Access-style database reports. C1Report exposes
an object model for creating, customizing, loading, and saving report definitions.
I experimented mostly with this component. I found it easy to use and easy to
customize with a variety of added controls.
C1RdlReport Component : The C1RdlReport component provides support for SQL Server Reporting Services. C1RdlReport
exposes the full RDL object model so you can modify existing reports or create
new reports without external dependencies such as Microsoft Reporting Services.
Import your existing SSRS report definitions (RDL) into C1RdlReport to programmatically
generate your reports and integrate them with the full ComponentOne Reporting
suite.
C1PrintDocument Component : The C1PrintDocument component provides an object model that allows you to create
arbitrarily complex documents in code. The object model specifically targets
paginated documents, providing a rich set of features to facilitate automatic
and intelligent pagination of complex structured documents. Documents can be
completely created in code, or bound to a database via a flexible data binding
model.
C1MultiDocument Component : C1MultiDocument is designed to allow creating, persisting and exporting large documents
that cannot be handled by a single document object due to memory limitations.
Use C1MultiDocument to combine multiple C1PrintDocuments, C1Reports and C1RdlReports
which will be rendered as a whole continuous document with shared page numbering,
a common TOC, word index, page count and inter-document hyperlinks.
Print Preview Controls : Reports includes six visual document viewing components, including C1PrintPreviewControl,
with features for previewing, formatting, printing, and exporting documents from
your Windows applications. Combine these print preview controls with C1Report
and C1PrintDocument to handle all kinds of document reporting needs.
C1ReportDesigner control : C1ReportDesigner is a Windows Forms control that provides the ability to design
and edit report definitions that can be used with the C1Report and preview controls.
Developers can use the C1ReportDesigner control to incorporate some report design
features into applications, or write unique full-fledged report designer applications.
The Report suite also include two standalone applications, the Report Designer Application,
and the Report Scheduler Application. Report Designer creates, edits, loads,
and saves report definition files that can be read directly by the C1Report component.
Report Scheduler includes a Windows service that is designed to run in the background
on your machine and generate ComponentOne Reports on set schedules. A big plus
is that you can redistribute the C1ReportDesigner application to deliver report
designing functionality to your end-users. To me, that feature alone is worth
the price of the control suite. Different users typically want different reports
with different information in them. Why not provide them with an application
that allows them to design their own?
Best of all, both applications come with complete source code, enabling developers
to freely modify and redistribute them, royalty free. If you need to develop
applications that include a reporting feature, these controls and application
can cut your programming time dramatically by seamlessly converting hundreds
of reports directly into your applications. Legacy Crystal Reports and Access
reports can be converted easily. Since C1Reports supports the new SSRS reporting
model, such as RDL report definitions, ComponentOne gives you a way to integrate
existing reports and create new reports using the C1RdlReport component in order
to leverage your existing SQL Server Reporting Services investment.
Another control in the WinForms offering is FlexGrid. It offers some really useful
features. Here's an example of one I did that mimics an Excel "autocomplete"
field:
Studio for WinForms comes with an extensive offering of samples that you can load
and test, or use as the basis for further work. Each of the sample categories
has a number of excellent sample projects. For example, the Report Samples alone
has 36 different samples ranging from Ad Hoc Sorting to the FlexGrid Printable
example. There are over 300 samples included.
With ComponentOne's Studio for WinForms controls, you'll be able to replicate
popular interfaces as seen in Microsoft Office and other programs. For example,
provide a docking UI similar to Visual Studio using DockingTab, create an appointments
calendar similar to Outlook with Scheduler, and deliver a complete Office 2010
menu system using Ribbon. These customizable controls can be easily modified
to perfectly fit your application, resulting in efficient, well-styled, rich
user-friendly UI effects.
The new 2012 release adds support for Visual Studio 11, a custom map field in C1Reports,
and a number of enhancements throughout the studio. Reports for WinForms now
offers a custom Mapping Field Added to the C1ReportDesigner. With the new mapping report field you can add visual maps to your reports. The report field is powered by ComponentOne
Maps for WPF, and gives you new ways to visualize your bound report data.
This new feature allows developers to show sales totals per country or state, visualize
which geographic areas have the most activity or revenue, and draw lines connecting
different cities to show routes or responsibilities. You can also render KML
files to show partial maps with colored regions and markers, auto-zoom a world
map to show a particular country or region, and render maps on multiple pages
of the report -- or show a single map at the beginning or end of the report.
There is also added support for rotated text with the Field.TextAngle property, and
added support for more shape fields such as triangles, ellipses, arcs and pie
shapes. Also added is parsing of EMF+ meta files when exporting to PDF, RTF and
XLS. The Report Designer application is now updated with the Office 2010 Visual
Style.
The ComponentOne website offers extensive documentation, user forums, and blogs to
help ease the learning curve in using this extensive set of high-quality controls.
We give ComponentOne Studio for WinForms controls high marks for usability, easy
learning curve, quality documentation, and good support. You can download a fully functional trial here.