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New Release Flex2Crystal 3.1 [Beta]

New Release Flex2Crystal 3.1 [Beta]

We are pleased to announce the release of a new beta of Flex2Crystal 3.1. As many of you know, Flex2Crystal 3.0 was just released a few short months ago. We've kept working on it in the meantime. This release contains just one bug fix and one new feature, but we're hoping they'll make a big impact.


First up is a simple fix that allows the Developer version of Flex2Crystal to properly detect newer releases of DataFlex. With DataFlex 18.0, Data Access Worldwide made some product name changes that effected our ability to detect the Studio. That has been fixed in this release.


The new feature we've added may seem small, but it's actually a big change. Over the years, as more companies have adopted Flex2Crystal, we've seen an increase in the number of issues related to properly detecting printers and printer features. Flex2Crystal has always exposed the native Crystal Reports print engine as-is. But even early on, due to issues we experienced in-house with this print engine, we decided to build a secondary print engine into Flex2Crystal as a backup for the primary print engine. Due to number of bugs that have cropped up in recent months, we've now decided to enable the secondary print engine as an optional feature.


This new print engine is based on the .NET System.Drawing.Printing classes. Our goal in enabling this new print system is twofold: 1) Fix the printing issues that our users are experiencing and 2) keep broad compatibility with existing code. In that vein, we've made the new print system a simple property that you can turn off and on with a single line of code:

Set pbUseNewPrintSystem to True


This property, which you set in your cFlex2Crystal class/object will enable the new print engine without requiring any other changes to your code OR any new Flex2Crystal runtime! If you're already using Flex2Crystal 3.0, simply install the new developer version which includes the package changes required to use this new print engine. There is no need to install this new release at your customer's site. If they're already running Flex2Crystal 3.0 you can simply recompile your application with the new packages and this property turned on and then distribute your new executable!


So what can you expect from this new print engine? We're hoping you'll give us some feedback in this area! Many of the reported bugs ONLY occurred at the customer site. Application developers were unable to reproduce the errors and we were unable to reproduce them in-house as well. We're expecting it to fix errors related to "COM object method invocation error." on the ComPrintOptions/ComSelectPrinter/ComPrinterName calls. Also errors related to not being able to find a printer that you know is present. ComExportOptions errors should also be alleviated by this fix. Additionally, some developers have reported that printing can be slow on Terminal Servers. Although we haven't been able to duplicate this issue, it may positively impact print speed on terminal servers as well.


As you can tell, we need YOUR help with this. Many of the bug reports we've received have NEVER been duplicated by us or the application developer! This means we need you to test this release as much as possible. We only have a limited set of printers, computers, and network configurations we can test against. If you can, please help us make this release of Flex2Crystal the best ever.


Try Flex2Crystal 3.1 Free for 30 Days

 

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