Syncfusion, Inc., the developer solutions company of choice, announced its second volume release of the year: Essential Studio 2016 Volume 2, adding enhancements and features across all supported platforms. Two suites in particular Essential Studio for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Essential Studio for Xamarin received substantial enhancements.

Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition includes 650+ Windows Forms, WPF, HTML5/jР°vascript, Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms, Silverlight, LightSwitch, Windows Phone, WinRT, and Universal Windows Platform components, Essential Studio Enterprise Edition helps you deliver truly enterprise-class applications.

Dynamic and feature-rich, this collection lets you easily add sophisticated functionality, high-performance capabilities, and stunning user interfaces to your web, mobile, and desktop applications. Among its hundreds of controls: Grids; a docking manager; a Ribbon control; editors; group bars, a skin manager; a navigation package; wizards; a tree package; charting; diagramming; a spreadsheet control; scheduling; gauges; pivot grids; mapping; grouping; a calculation engine; a Gantt control; syntax highlighting; Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and PDF creation/modification capabilities; RDL reporting (a designer, a writer, and a viewer); OLAP controls, and a PDF viewer.

Also included is Essential Predictive Analytics, a .NET execution engine that can execute PMML models and provide real-time results from within your .NET applications - without any third-party dependencies. Each Essential Studio Enterprise Edition subscription includes access to the Syncfusion Plus program, giving the licensee access to three enterprise solutions: Dashboard Platform (1 Server license and 15 CALs per organization included), Big Data Platform (1 cluster with 5 nodes per organization included), and Report Platform (1 Server license and 15 CALs per organization included).

Also included in the Syncfusion Plus program is the hybrid mobile application solution Orubase. The package ships with 4,000+ useful samples and incorporates a unique debugging system that allows for switching between debug and release versions of the library with a single click from inside the Visual Studio.NET IDE.

Essential Studio Enterprise Edition includes the following libraries.

- Essential Tools - Collection of great user interface controls including Office 2010 and Visual Studio.NET-style controls, docking windows, editors, and more.
- Essential Grid - Fully customizable industry-standard grid control with extensive Excel-like feature set.
- Essential Chart - High-performance business chart component with a unique point-based styles architecture, more than 30 chart types, and extensive user interaction capabilities.
- Essential Diagram - Essential Diagram is a .NET framework for developing Microsoft Visio-like interactive 2-D graphics and diagramming applications.
- Essential Edit - Enhanced text editor similar to the Visual Studio code editor with great features such as syntax highlighting, multi-level undo/redo, and IntelliSense.
- Essential Grouping - Essential Grouping is a high-performance grouping engine that can group any list of data.
- Essential XlsIO - Essential XlsIO is a .NET framework component that can read and write Microsoft Excel files (from Excel versions 97 to 2010) without any reliance on Excel.
- Essential Calculate - Essential Calculate is a full-fledged standalone formula engine. It comes with a function library of more than 150 commonly used formulas for your business objects.
- Essential PDF - Essential PDF is a full featured .NET library that can create and modify PDF files without any dependence on Adobe.
- Essential HTMLUI - Essential HTMLUI is a 100% .NET HTML display engine. It can be used to create extremely flexible user interfaces.
- Essential DocIO - .NET library that can read and write Microsoft Word files, with a full-fledged object model similar to Microsoft Office COM libraries.
- Essential Gauge - Allows you to use XAML and C# to create many gauge designs including circular gauges, linear gauges, rolling gauges, and digital gauges for visualizing data.
- Essential Schedule - A UI control library that lets you add Outlook-like scheduling capabilities to your applications.
- Essential Maps - Provides a graphical representation of geographical data for map applications. It can be used to represent statistical data for specific regions. The built-in Navigation control makes it easy to move through the map. With Essential Maps, you can load ESRI Shapefiles, employ color palettes with custom colors, and zoom or pan a map with powerful event mechanisms.
- Essential Spreadsheet - Edit Excel files in a familiar Excel-like interface without having Excel installed.
- Essential Gantt - Add a Microsoft Project-like project-management interface to your applications.
- Essential PDF - .NET library that can create and modify PDF files without any external dependency on Adobe Acrobat. Convert a multitude of files to PDF and have complete control over your document.
- Essential PDF Viewer - View, print, and export PDF files from your WPF or Windows Forms applications without any reliance on Adobe Acrobat.
- Essential Report Viewer - A component for viewing reports defined in Microsoft's RDL format in your WPF and Silverlight applications. Support is provided for various report visualization elements such as charts, grids, gauges, text boxes, images, rectangles, and lines.
- Essential Report Writer - A class library that enables you to render RDL-format reports as PDFs. The reports can be tabular, graphical, or free-form, and can make use of relational, multidimensional, XML, and object data sources.
- Essential ProjIO - Native .NET library that enables applications to read and write Microsoft Project .xml files without any reliance on Microsoft Project.
- Essential BI Grid - Interactive grid great for visualizing OLAP data from XMLA-compatible data sources like MS SQL and Mondrian. Summarize, analyze, and explore your critical business data and make informed decisions.
- Essential BI Client - Includes a powerful UI for managing your OLAP data with business intelligence analysis that includes slicers, filters, summaries, and KPIs.
- Essential BI Chart - Capable of representing business intelligence data as charts from any XMLA-compatible source like MS SQL and Mondrian
- Essential BI Gauge - Capable of representing business intelligence data in gauges from any XMLA-compatible source like MS SQL and Mondrian.
- Essential BI PivotGrid - A powerful pivot table for visualizing relational data in a multidimensional UI that works with relational data. Also features support for exporting grid content to Excel, Word, and PDF documents while preserving format.

ESSENTIAL STUDIO 2018 VOLUME 2

We are excited to share that we have enhanced the chart in Essential JS 2 with the following new features in our 2018 Volume 2 release:

Scrollbar for zooming and panning.
Histogram series.
Grouping slice in accumulation charts.
Scrollbar for zooming and panning
Panning and zooming the chart can be done using mouse and touch actions on a chart area. However, if we have a scrollbar on an axis, it is easier to zoom or view data on a desktop. So, in this release, we have provided support for scrollbars in chart and they work as shown in the following.

Histogram series
We have added a new series type called histogram for this release. The histogram series provides options to visualize large amounts of data that are difficult to present in a tabular or spreadsheet form.

Grouping slice in accumulation charts
Now, a set of data for accumulation charts can be grouped based on number of points. For example, when you want to show the medal details of the top 10 countries in a chart, and then put the other countries together in one category, you can use this feature. This helps you visualize data more clearly when you have a large amount of it.

We hope that you will enjoy these new features in chart. These features are available for all other JS2 platforms, such as Angular, React, Vue, ASP.NET Core, and ASP.NET MVC. You can find the 2018 Volume 2 Essential JS 2 install download link here. Please feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section below.

We are excited to announce that we are including a chunk upload feature in the Essential JS 2 uploader component in the 2018 Volume 2 release. This feature is the best way to upload large files and it comes with pause, resume, retry, and abort options.

In this blog post, we are going to look at how to upload large files using the chunk upload features.

Why chunk upload?
Generally, uploading a large file is a very difficult process, especially uploading a file from mobile devices or other weak network connections. The large files may be high resolution images, audio or video files, etc. Trying to upload a large file in a single upload request is not reliable; it may cause a timeout issue or fail at the end of the file upload. So, the chunked upload concept was introduced, which helps handle the large file uploads.

What is chunk upload?
In chunk upload, large files are sliced into small chunks based on specified chunk size and uploaded to the server as these small chunks. Chunk upload is applicable only for the asynchronous mode of uploader.

How chunk upload works?
How chunk upload works:

You browse for or drag the large file you want to upload to the uploader.
The uploader accepts the file and slices the file into small chunks based on specified chunk size value.
The chunks are transferred to the server asynchronously in a sequential order.
The server creates a file with a part extension (.part) and overrides it for every chunk.
Once the final chunk is received, the file is reassembled and saved with its original extension in the server.
Configuration
Chunk upload is implemented based on HTML5 File API. To make it work, here are the client-side and server-side configurations.

Client-side configuration
To enable the chunk upload in uploader component, following are the steps in an Angular application:

Create an Angular application by following the getting started section, and configure the necessary settings to render the uploader component.
Set the chunkSize property in bytes as shown in the following. We configured 2 MB as the chunk size in this code snippet.

Server-side configuration
The chunk file upload depends on how we are processing it server-side. There are various ways to process the chunks on the server end.

In the following method, we read the file data and chunk index from posted parameters. If the chunk index is 0, save the chunk as a new file, otherwise append the new chunk to the existing file. The process will continue until the last chunk is received.

Pause and resume upload
The resumable upload is helpful for restarting a file upload where it failed instead of uploading the whole file again. The uploader provides necessary options to achieve the resumable upload and is implemented using the Essential JS 2 AJAX library.

Workflow of resumable upload
When a user pauses a file upload, these are the processes that will execute:

Send an abort request from a client.
Save the current progress level and further process.
Replace pause icon with resume icon.
When a user resumes a file upload, these are the processes that will execute:

Previously aborted chunk upload request is raised.
Resume icon replaces pause icon.
Progress bar resumes, showing the current progress value of the upload.
Server starts to merge the chunks into a .part extension file.
Retry upload
It is possible to retry a failed or aborted file upload caused by a network connection issue, an interruption, or user cancellation. You can retry the upload in the following ways:

Autoretry
Retry through UI
Autoretry
By configuring the retryCount and retryAfterDelay properties, you can enable the autoretry option, which tries to upload a failed chunk automatically until it reaches the maxRetry count.

Configure the following code to enable the autoretry option in uploader:

Retry through UI
When you click on the retry icon, it triggers the upload process again. The retry icon is visible in the following scenarios:

After trying the maximum number of retries without the file uploading.
Canceling a file upload.

Syncfusion’s file format libraries get exciting updates (new features and enhancements) in the Essential Studio release 2018 Volume 2. Most of these items have been included based on your valuable feedback. Syncfusion’s file format libraries provide .NET class libraries to create, edit, write, and convert Excel, PDF, Word, and PowerPoint file formats in the .NET Framework, Xamarin, .NET Core, and UWP applications without Microsoft Office or Adobe dependencies.

In this blog, let me walk you through the new items included in the 2018 Volume 2 release for our file formats libraries.


Essential PDF
Right-to-left text in Xamarin and .NET Core
Essential PDF allows you to add right-to-left (RTL) text (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu) and bi-directional (bidi) in PDF documents in Xamarin and .NET Core applications.

Digital signature enhancements
You can flatten the existing PDF digital signature fields to remove the digital signature assigned to the signature field.
You can add time stamps to the PDF document without using a certificate in .NET Core.

Syncfusion is excited to announce the new controls added in the Essential Studio for Xamarin suite in the 2018 Volume 2 release. All these controls are available in the Xamarin.Forms, Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.iOS platforms. It’s again a feature-rich release in this year, with a lot of new enhancements and new controls to play around with.

New segmented control
The new segmented control is a linear set of two or more segments, each of which functions as a mutually exclusive button. Within the control, all segments are equal in width. Like buttons, segments can contain text or images. Segmented controls are often used to display different views. In maps, for example, a segmented control lets you switch between Map, Transit, and Satellite views. Our segmented view has been designed to achieve multiple use cases. That way, it can be used as a traditional segmented control, toggle button, color picker, token, switch, secondary view for tab view, or a group button.

New combo box control
A new combo box control allows the user to type a value or choose an option from a list of predefined options. It includes features such as data binding, filtering, UI customization, and much more.

New tab view control for UWP

In the previous release, we introduced a new tab view control for Android and iOS. Now, it has been extended to Xamarin.Forms for UWP. Tab view provides a simple and intuitive interface for tab navigation in your mobile application. Users can explore and switch among different views like All Contacts, the Recent Calls log, the dial pad, etc. It includes features such as the ability to add multiple tab items, swipe on the content to move to next tab, display font icons, customize the header with custom view, place top and bottom headers, and various other features to customize the appearance of the tabs.

We are excited to announce updates for our very popular Xamarin chart control in the 2018 Volume 2 release. The focus of this release for the chart component is to support macOS on Xamarin platforms, and other usability related features and improvements based on customer feedback. Here are all the planned updates:

Chart support for macOS in Xamarin.Forms (preview).
Attribute support for designing in AXML files in Xamarin.Android.
Date-time category axis support.
“Others” category in pie and doughnut series for grouping small data points.
Ability to add text to the center of doughnut charts.
Different shape types in scatter series.
Let's take a deeper look at each of these features.

Chart supports macOS in Xamarin.Forms (preview)
It's been more than three years since the release of Xamarin.Forms, and it’s been aggressively improved by adding support for more platforms, implementing dozens of new features, and providing greater stability. We at Syncfusion closely monitor changes in Xamarin.Forms and continue to ensure our controls always work with the latest version. Now, we will begin adding support for the macOS platform in our Xamarin.Forms controls, starting with the chart, data grid, and list view. The Xamarin.Forms for macOS versions of our controls will support the same features that are available in the other Xamarin.Forms platforms. To include the macOS platform as a target in your existing Xamarin.Forms project, create a new Xamarin.Mac project and add the Xamarin.Forms libraries as explained in this blog. Next, add the Syncfusion.Xamarin.SfChart NuGet package or the necessary assemblies inside the macOS folder to include the chart component. That’s it! Now your app is ready to be installed in a Mac machine with a beautiful chart control.

Attribute support for designing in AXML files in Xamarin.Android
What else would help reduce layout design time in Xamarin.Android apps? How about being able to see a preview of an entire layout in the designer, with proper rendering of all the views and the actual output. In 2018 Volume 2, the chart control for Xamarin.Android will be rendered in the designer when you drag and drop from the toolbox, and also support attributes for customizing the appearance. With these improvements, it is no longer a requirement to deploy the app in a device or emulator to check the output of your layout for every change.

Date-time category axis support
A date-time category axis is one of the most requested features from our customers. It allows users to plot date-time values without a visual gap between two data points. It is similar to a category axis, but the ranges and interval are calculated based on the date-time value. The following code example shows how to create the DateTimeCategoryAxis and set it to the PrimaryAxis property.

Group small data points into “others” category in pie and doughnut series
When there are so many data points in a pie or doughnut chart that it is difficult to see the smallest slices, one solution is to group the smallest values into an "Others" category. Support for this behavior has been added to the Xamarin chart component in 2018 Volume 2. It can be configured using two properties: GroupMode, which specifies the grouping type to be based on slice angle, actual data point value, or percentage; and GroupTo, which sets the limit to group data points into a single slice. The following code example shows how to group the segments in a pie series.

Add text to the center of a doughnut chart
Text or any view can be added at the center of a doughnut chart to show any information about the data presented. It is typically used to show information about a selected doughnut slice or any other information about the visualized data. The binding context of the center view will be the chart series so that you can make use of data binding to display any information from the chart series. The following code example shows how to set up the center view of a doughnut chart and how to bind some properties from ViewModel.

Different shapes in scatter series
Previously, we have relied on data marker symbols and assigning series a transparent color to plot scatter charts with different shapes. Now we have added support for shapes, and you can directly configure them in scatter series by using the ShapeType property. The available shapes are cross, diamond, ellipse, hexagon, inverted triangle, pentagon, plus, rectangle, and triangle. The following code example shows how to set up a scatter chart with default and diamond shapes.

The Schedule component for Xamarin.Forms has been made highly customizable for the 2018 Volume 2 release, with support to completely customize its appearance and behavior. We have also added several key features such as drag and drop support, agenda view support, time zone support, other minor enhancements, and fixed several bugs.

This blog post will showcase the new features added to the Xamarin.Forms schedule component in 2018 Volume 2.

We are excited to announce that our new Windows Forms data grid has been released in its final version in 2018 Volume 2. The following features are included:

Master-Details view
Cell merging
Font orientation
Busy indicator support for long operation
Combo box column type
Blazing fast Excel filter
Combo box editor in filter row
Multi selection combo box editor in filter row
Built-in Office 2016 theme support
Master-details view
The master-details view allows you to represent hierarchical data in the form of nested tables. The number of tables that can be nested with relationships is unlimited. This view can be exported to Excel and PDF.

Cell merging
Cell merging allows you to merge a range of adjacent cells. We have provided event support to define the cell range to be merged at run time. The merged cells can be exported to Excel and PDF.

Font orientation
You can set an orientation for fonts in grid cells. Any rotation angle can be specified, and the text in the cells will be rotated based on the angle.

Blazing-fast Excel filter
We have improved the loading performance of the Excel-like filter so that it will no longer appear unresponsive for large data.

Combo box column type
The combo box column type displays a list of values in a drop-down list. The value member or display member can be set to the column. You can decide whether data operations such as sorting, grouping, and filtering will be performed based on the display member or value member.

Only for V.I.P