There are many advances in features and functionality in version 5 and later. Please review the entire manual for details. This section focuses on areas of the rendering process that changed between version 4 and 5.
There has been a change in the extension used for report templates
and datasources to highlight the internal formats have been completely updated.
Both file types still hold XML, but the new structure allows more features to
be supported while reducing the file size. In version 4, a report template was saved
with the .template extension, whereas in version 5 the extension is
.rml (Report Markup Language). In version 4 the datasources were
grouped together in a single .sav file, whereas from version 5
each datasource is stored as a separate .ds file in the repository.
This makes for much faster loading and simplified deployment.
In version 4, the rendering sequence was:
Report Header ----Page Header --------Section Header ------------Details --------Section Footer ----Report Footer Page Footer
From version 5, there can be multiple sections in a report, and each section has the following render sequence:
Page Header ----Section Header --------Group Header ------------Details --------Group Footer ----Section Footer Page Footer
As you can see, this is a more symmetrical arrangement. To avoid confusion, because version 5 onwards supports multiple Sections, the version 4 Section Headers are now called Group Headers, and Section Header/Footer refer to the header and footer of each entire report section. (If there is only a single section in the report, then these are effectively report header and report footer respectively.)
From Elixir Report version 5 onwards, we have consolidated the scripting language for our products to be JavaScript which more convenient for non-programmers. The scheme functions provided in version 4 will be obsoleted in this version. Many scheme functions will be automatically converted into JavaScript during the migration, however in a few cases, especially with data caches, there is no corresponding API in version 5. This is because from version 5 Elixir tools are based on a true multi-threaded system, and the version 4 API made a number of assumptions that are not sustainable in a multi-threaded environment.
XML DataSource: Elixir Report version 5 (or later) supports the XML2 datasource using XPath to query the XML document, locate and retrieve data.
Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) Datasource: The EJB datasource is available through the Object Datasource from version 5.
Below is the list of report elements that will not be migrated automatically. Manual creation of the report element is required:
Barcode Component
Chart Component: This report element is replaced with charts rendered using JFreeChart from version 5.
SVG Component
Boxed-In-Text Component: This report element is replaced by the Data Grid component from version 5.
HTML Component & Rich Text Format (RTF) Component: These report elements are supported through Callback component from version 5.
Multi-Row Data Cache Viewer Component: This report element is replaced by the Data Grid component from version 5.
Table Cache View Component: This report element is replaced by the Table component from version 5.
Special parameters that were understood by the Elixir Report 4 engine are often handled differently in Elixir Report 5 and above. This means that parameters like "elixir.report.ds.parameter.keyset" will be migrated to ER5 parameters, but the engine will no longer utilise them. Such special parameters are no longer required in version 5 - all features can be set through the tool user interface, so there is no need to remember these long parameter names.
XHTML Files rendered with Elixir Report 3.x method will be obsoleted from version 5.
Java Graphics Format (JGF) export format is replaced by Glint vector graphics format which is more precise and compact as well as supporting additional features.