Better WPF-PreviewControl

A native WPF-Viewer-Control would solve a lot of Problems:

  • Drilldown-Support
  • long time for loading large ll-Files (> 100 pages) (WindowForms is much better optimized)
  • No "Printer Icon" in Tray (only some OS)
  • No XPS-Printer needed

It would be also nice to have an Designer in WPF, so that it can be intagrated in a Control.

This would also be nice considering data security and privacy when printig critical data. Once an ll-file is written to the harddrive it is difficult to delete it irretrievably.

We’ll likely add a WPF hosted flavor of the WinForms control in LL22 that has the identical interface codewise. That way, you’ll get all the features by simply replacing one WPF control with another.

We’ve investigated a native EMF rendering in WPF and also evaluated a couple of libraries that do EMF <-> XAML translations. However, none of these approaches really did the job well enough.

I figure adding WinForms assemblies is not the most beautiful solution but hope the features you get this way will compensate for that:

  • drilldown support
  • incremental preview
  • interactive reporting (sorting, expandable regions)
  • report parameter support
  • index, reverse side, table of contents

This is in the product: https://www.combit.net/en/blog/development/september-2016/wpf-wrapper-for-previewcontrol/. A true native WPF solution is currently out of scope, unfortunately.