Is there a Flexcel roadmap?
Is there a plan to enable the creation of charts using the api?
Thanks
Hi,
We don't have a public roadmap because it is just too
hard to predict dates, and sometimes the roadmap is not followed at all
because something more important came and changed our priorities.
But
well, it is not a secret that the next FlexCel version is v7, which is
going to be one of the biggest releases in years, and whose focus is
charts (even when improves in thousands of small things too). The
FlexCel 7 release is already delayed, it should have been done many
months ago, but we keep finding stuff to fix and we aren't going to
release it until it works as expected. So we are already delayed in our
roadmap. But also, originally FlexCel 7 was going to be about xlsx chart
rendering and adding charts with the API, and now adding chart with the
API has been moved to a later release.
Xlsx
chart rendering is proving much more difficult than what we expected to
get it right (right now we are rendering most xlsx charts better than
google sheets, apple numbers or libreoffice, but we are still not up to
the quality bar we have for FlexCel). So as soon as it is ready we will
be releasing it, and we will be delaying the chart API for 7.1 or later.
It makes no sense to have people who is waiting for chart rendering
wait until we also have the API working: so we will release each one as
it is ready.
The good news is that most of
the work done for chart rendering is basically creating an API, so most
of the work for a chart API is already done. But there is still a lot
of testing to do, also docs, demos, APIMate support for the chart API,
etc, and waiting to have all that done for v7 would just delay it too
much. So the chart API is happening later, hopefully in 7.1
Many thanks for the detailed update. I'm sure we are all looking forward to V7
Hi Adrian,
in version 7 there is a possibility to handle the printer preview thumbnail ? (something like point on a thumbnail with mouse and with rigth button remove it?).
Thank's for all
Regards
Daniele
Hi,
We have some future plans for the preview (allow
searching, selecting text, setting margins and yes, deleting pages is in
our list too), but for the FlexCel 7 release we are focusing on the
basics (besides of course all the chart stuff). We've reviewed most of
the code to make it better, and more in line with what modern Excel
does. In many places inside xls or xlsx files the same stuff is saved
twice or even 3 or 4 times, for different versions of Excel (each
version of Excel reads a different part of the same file).
In
theory, all parts have the same information so it shouldn't matter what
part you read, but in practice those parts are often not in synch,
meaning that what you see in Excel is not what you see in FlexCel
(because they are reading different information). So most of the "under
the hood" work is to make FlexCel read and understand the newer parts up
to Excel 2019, instead of reading older parts as it is doing now.
About
the particular "deleting pages" issue, you can today set the
"PopupMenu" property of the FlexCelPreivewer component you have for the
thumbnail, and have it show a popup menu with right click where an
option can be "Delete page". This all works now: I've just tested it.
But the main issue is: On the "Click" event of the popup menu, how do
you actually remove a page in the preview?
"Pages"
in Excel don't exist, you have a simple big grid. The concept of page
only happens when printing. You can't do a "xls.DeletePage()" in the
popup menu event, because there are no pages to delete. So in order to
support this, we would need to have a way to skip pages from
printing/previewing, maybe a big array or pages [0,1,2,3...] where you
can set which pages print and which don't. I am not sure, but we need to
think it a little more.
Hi Adrian,
thank's for reply.
It was just a question, nothing else.
Thank's again.
Regards
Daniele
without committing to anything, is there an approximate timescale for V7? 3 months, 6 months, a year? Longer than that?
It would help with development planning to know. Thanks
Current plans are for end july, but once again, it wouldn't be the first time it would be delayed as it already is.Note that this is for 7.0,which won't yet have the API, as that will be for 7.1
so autumn for 7.1 (with a fair following wind)?