Happy Holidays / New Year! 2018 recap and 2019 roadmap

On behalf of everyone at Software Forces and the .rpt Inspector Online team we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy Holiday season :gift: and a joyful :fireworks: New Year! Read on for a 2018 recap and a 2019 roadmap (scroll towards bottom).

2018 has been another amazing year for .rpt Inspector Online. This year we introduced a number of new editors, improved the documentation tool, added a DIFF / compare tool, improved ODBC in the Change Data Source tool, added OLE DB support in the Change Data Source tool, and extended our browser support to include Microsoft Edge.

We are grateful for all the interest and support you’ve shown us and we are excited for the tools and features coming in 2019. Together we’ll continue to evolve and improve the tools and look forward to your continued support, ideas, comments, bugs, and feedback.

2018 Recap

All items marked with green check mark have been implemented in 2018:

2019 Roadmap

With 2018 almost behind us, and what an exciting and busy 2018 has been, we’d like to share our plans of what we’d like to bring you in 2019. The list below is in no particular order except where noted and is subject to change.

Note: All items marked with green check mark have been implemented

  • Object Editor, starting with the Text Object. Based on the desktop tools Objects Editor.
  • Additional objects for the Object Editor, including Box, Fields, Line, Map, etc.
  • Impact Analysis tool to include Formulas and Parameters
    • We would love your input and feedback on how we can make it more useful to you!
  • :white_check_mark: Used / Unused Formulas allow to include the Formula Definition
  • :white_check_mark: Used / Unused Parameter allow to include the Parameter Options
  • :white_check_mark: Used / Unused Parameter allow to include the Parameter Default Values
  • Bring in more of the desktop tools editors, Sections Editor, SQL Expression Editor, Running Tools Editor, Alerts Editor
  • Add support opening Crystal Reports from Crystal Reports Server, BusinessObjects BI Platform, Business Objects Enterprise like .rpt Inspector Enterprise Suite supports
  • Improvements to the Change Data Source tool
    • Add field mapping
    • Let us know which feature or changes to the Change Data Source tool to make it even more useful to you
  • Improvements to the Custom documentation tool
    • :white_check_mark: Export as PDF
    • :white_check_mark: Export as Text
    • :white_check_mark: Export as Word
    • :white_check_mark: Export in a friendly format for doing compare / difference in other tools.
  • Improvements to the Formula Editor
    • Spell checker
    • Field lookup
    • Formula validation check prior to saving
  • Formula compare / difference tool
  • Improvements to the Parameter Editor
    • Import default values from external file
    • Import default values from external data source
    • Spell checker
    • :white_check_mark: Export default values
      • :white_check_mark: as CSV
      • :white_check_mark: as JSON
  • Global spell checker
  • Improve adding reports
    • Shortcuts
    • UNC paths
    • Selection
  • Tag added reports which can then be used for grouping or filtering to work with in batches
  • A few surprises along the way. :wink:

As you can see, 2019 is going to be a very busy year as we strive to bring these features to .rpt Inspector Online. We would love to hear your comments, ideas, and feature requests in these forums about the above features (as well as any others that help you).