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Home » Newsletter » March 2019

by .NET Team

The v19.1 and v19.2 releases of Gnostice Document Studio .NET introduce major new benefits and capabilities to .NET developers across all frameworks of .NET, including ASP.NET, WPF, WinForms, Xamarin, Azure, and developing for .NET Core. v19.1 was released on March 13, 2019 and v19.2 will be released in Q2 2019. This article lists the major new features released in v19.1 and the features that can be expected in v19.2. The article will be updated on an ongoing basis with regard to the upcoming v19.2 release.

Product marketing name change from Gnostice XtremeDocumentStudio .NET to Gnostice Document Studio .NET [v19.1]

We wanted to make the product name simpler and so we took the steps to change the product marketing name from Gnostice XtremeDocumentStudio .NET to Gnostice Document Studio .NET. There is no code break resulting from this change.

Enable/Disable Lazy Loading in the ASP.NET Document Viewer [v19.1]

When a document is loaded on the ASP.NET Document Viewer, using the client-side API loadDocument, the viewer starts to load the document in a background thread. The normal behaviour, before v19.1, was to render the pages that are currently visible on the viewer, on initial load and as the user scrolls the view. In some specific scenarios it may be required to render the entire document in background after the initial view is rendered. Form Filling is one such scenario and also for viewing documents with less than ten pages or so and when you need to have all the pages loaded and ready. With v19.1 you can set “Preferences.lazyLoading” to true, which is the default value, to keep the normal old behaviour of rendering only pages in view, or set “Preferences.lazyLoading” to false to continue to load the document in background until all pages of the document are loaded and displayed in the viewer. The “onFormLoaded” event is fired after all form fields on all the pages of the document are loaded and displayed in the viewer.

Skip over specific fields when tabbing through a PDF form in the ASP.NET Document Viewer [v19.1]

A popular feature of our ASP.NET Document Viewer is the PDF form filling functionality. Using this feature you can display the PDF form that you want users to fill out. The captured data can then be submitted back to your servers for further processing. When users are filling out the form the viewer allows for navigation between the form fields using the tab/shift-tab keys. The tab ordering for the form fields is what is defined in the PDF document. However, if you want the navigation to skip over specific form fields, it is now possible to program it. This can be achieved by first querying for the form field object using the API DocumentViewer.Forms.getFormField (by passing in the fully qualified field name) and then disabling the tab-stop property by calling setTabStop API on the form field object.

Specify the file format of the downloaded file on click of “Download” button in the ASP.NET Document Viewer [v19.1]

The ASP.NET Document Viewer supports viewing of documents of various formats. The viewer also presents a toolbar button to allow the user to download the document being viewed in the original format. Attached to the download button is a drop-list that allows the user to download the document in a different format. It is now possible to set a default file format so that when the download button is clicked the document is downloaded in the specified format rather than the original format. This default download format can be set by handling the beforeDocumentDownload event on the client-side as shown below.

documentViewer.addEventListener(gnostice.EventNames.beforeDocumentDownload, function (e)
{
    e.downloadFormat.value = ".pdf";
});

Support for German and French languages in the WinForms Document Viewer UI [v19.1]

Localization is the process of customizing the application for a given language/locale. Previously the only supported language was English. Version 19.1 adds support for German and French locales, and the language resource files have been shipped along with the dlls. The resource files must be present in the same folder as the DLLs. The application will automatically select the appropriate resource file depending on the system locale. To change the language at runtime, use the following code in your project:

// For German 
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("de-DE");
// For French
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("fr");

Screenshot showing UI in French

Screenshot showing UI in German

For the full list of issues resolved in v19.1, please have a look at the Gnostice Document Studio .NET product History page.

With the v19.1 release done, we are busy at work on v19.2. We are really excited about the major new features, enhancements and possibilities the v19.2 release will bring to .NET developers. Some of the highlights in v19.2 include:

• New completely redesigned, high-performance .NET Core compliant PDF engine.
• Overhauled, .NET Core compliant DOCX, DOC, XLS, XLSX, image, and text engines.
• Xamarin forms Document Viewer for iOS and Android with rich document viewing tools.
• Major Document Studio framework level and low-level design improvements, and optimized package restructuring for maximum code reuse.
• ...and more.

Here are screenshots of the Xamarin Forms Document Viewer running on iOS and Android:

Stay tuned for more News.