Syncfusion Essential Studio^® 2024 Volume 1 Is Here!

Syncfusion is thrilled to unveil the first major release of the year: Essential Studio®^® 2024 Volume 1. With eagerly anticipated, captivating new controls and features, this release is set to revolutionize your experience.

Let’s delve into the extraordinary highlights of each platform.

.NET MAUI

• Syncfusion .NET MAUI controls now support light and dark visual themes.
• In the 2024 Volume 1 release, we introduce the following .NET MAUI controls in preview mode:
  • Chat: Provides a modern conversational chatbot experience that shows the conversation between two or more users in a fully customizable layout.
  • Parallax View: Offers a parallax effect to the background view by moving the background element at different speeds.
  • Polar and Radar Chart: Facilitate effective visualization of value and angle comparisons, aiding in data analysis.
  • Radial Menu: Displays a hierarchical menu in a circular layout optimized for touch-enabled devices.
  • Rotator: A data control used to display image data and navigate through them. The images can be selected either by Thumbnail or by Dots support.
  • Step ProgressBar: To indicate the progress of a multi-step(state) process.
  • TreeMap: Provides a simple yet effective way to visualize flat or hierarchical data as clustered rectangles with a specific weighted attribute determining the size of the rectangle.

• The DataGrid control now supports:
  • Unbound rows: Add the rows at the top and bottom of the DataGrid that are not bound with the data object of the underlying data source. 
  • Unbound columns: Add columns not bound with the data object from the underlying data source.
  • Column resizing: To resize the columns by tapping and dragging the right border of the column header.
  • Load more: Enables users to load and display additional data in the DataGrid as they scroll or request more content.
  • PullToRefresh: To refresh the data when the DataGrid is pulled down.

• The Cartesian Charts control now supports:
  • Histogram series: To visualize the data points with a continuous range in column format.
  • Plot band: To shade specific regions or ranges in the plot area background at regular or custom intervals. You can also add text to indicate the significance of a specific region.
• The Circular Charts control allows users to customize data labels with views and display them as percentage values of corresponding data points’ y-values.
• The DataForm now supports a floating label layout to make labels elegantly float above input fields in date, time, and picker editor controls.
• The Image Editor now supports:
  • Serialize and deserialize annotations.
  • Custom annotation view.
  • Z-Ordering to change the order of the annotations in the Z-axis.
• The PDF Viewer now supports:
  • E-Signatures: Adding, removing, and modifying electronic signatures, including free-hand drawing and image signatures.
  • Custom bookmarks: Adding, removing, and modifying custom bookmarks in pdf files.
  • Different page layout modes: This feature allows users to view the PDF files in different layout modes, such as continuous and single page. The single-page layout mode can enhance the reading experience, especially when the content is text-heavy. It provides a focused view, allowing readers to concentrate on one page at a time without distractions. The layout seamlessly transitions from one page to another when presenting PDF documents as slideshows.
• The Scheduler now provides customization options for cell selection and appointment indicator count supports.
• The Treeview now supports:
  • Load on demand: To load child items when expanding the parent node.
  • CheckBox for each node: To have checked and unchecked states.
• The following .NET MAUI controls have been developed to meet the industry standards and are now marked as production-ready:
  • Cards
  • Carousel
  • Navigation Drawer
  • Pull to Refresh
  • Sunburst Chart
  • Switch
  • TreeView

Flutter

• Syncfusion Flutter widgets now support the Material 3 UI theme. This is Google’s latest design language, bringing a fresh, modern look and feel to your Flutter apps.

• The PDF Viewer now supports the following features:
  • Active viewport rendering: This enhancement optimizes performance by rendering only the visible portion of the PDF document at higher zoom levels, disregarding the content outside the viewport.
  • Undo and redo in form-filling: Users can now effortlessly backtrack and redo actions while filling out PDF forms, enhancing ease of use.

• You can observe the following notable improvements in the Charts:
  • Enhanced the interaction performance for crosshair and trackball behavior by 2x.
  • Exposed methods for pointer and gesture events and a paint method for customizing the crosshair and trackball.
• The PDF library now supports the following features:
  • Users can collaborate seamlessly by sharing annotated PDFs and importing annotations from external sources.
  • Users can now check or uncheck the check box items that are grouped in PDF documents.

Blazor

• Timeline component: Introduced a new Blazor Timeline component to visualize events chronologically.
• The following Blazor components have been developed to meet the industry standards and are now marked as production-ready.
  • Data Form
  • Dropdown Tree
  • Stepper
• The DataGrid now supports advanced features, including exporting with customizable columns, captions, and detail templates. It offers expanded search and filter operators, allowing the current selection of existing filtered data to be added.
• The Diagram introduces swimlane support, enabling the grouping and categorizing activities or tasks based on roles or departments. It also features improved line routing to prevent overlap with the neighboring nodes, ensuring a cleaner visual representation.
• The File Manager now supports rendering flat data objects, eliminating the need for HTTP client requests and backend URL configuration. Users can override the standard sorting mechanism to tailor it to specific app requirements.
• The Gantt Chart allows users to split tasks in the resource view. This feature will enable users to temporarily pause work on a task due to unforeseen circumstances or task reprioritization, indicating that the remaining work will resume later in the schedule.
• The Query Builder now handles advanced query types with lock/unlock rule and clone rule supports.
• The PDF Viewer now provides an option to include a customizable toolbar. Users can tailor their toolbar to their needs by adding new items, hiding existing ones, and repositioning items for optimal workflow efficiency on desktop and mobile PDF Viewers.

Essential JS 2

• In the 2024 Volume 1 release, we introduce the following Essential JS 2 controls in preview mode:
  • 3D Circular Chart: This chart displays data in three dimensions, where each slice’s size reflects its proportion relative to the entire dataset. This helps visualize and understand data patterns with ease.
  • Timeline: Displays series of data in chronological order, facilitating user activities like tracking, progress visualization, historical timelines, and more.
  • TextArea: Offering essential input functionality for multiline text entry. It includes clear icons, floating labels, customizable sizing, validation states, and more. This helps enhance the user experience by handling comments, messages, and lengthy content.

• The new features added to the Word Processor are:
  • Collaborative editing (Preview to production): Allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously in real-time, enhancing team collaboration and efficiency.

• • Heading in navigation pane: Supports navigating the document using headings.

• • DOTX export: Supports saving documents as Word Templates (DOTX), ensuring consistency, efficiency, and branding in document creation.

• • Color picker customization: Customize the appearance of the color picker to default or palette mode, providing flexibility in color selection.
  • Mention feature: Allows users to mention others using the @ character to collaborate, enhance communication, and acknowledge the contributors.
  • Comments enhancement: Improves user interaction and comprehension with enhancements in the comment resolved state, using visual markers to signify resolution status.
  • Change case functionality: Quickly change the capitalization of selected text without retyping, offering various case options for convenience.
• The PDF Viewer supports streamlining document management with features like page rotation, insertion, deletion, customizable context menus, and keyboard accessibility for efficient interaction.
• The Query Builder offers expanded query functionality with support for advanced query types, locking options, and cloning capabilities, enhancing versatility and control in query building.
• The Gantt Chart provides improved project plan refinement with undo and redo support, multi-taskbars in the project view, and template support in PDF export, enabling better tracking and visualization of project tasks.
• The DataGrid supports creating visually appealing layouts with spanning rows and columns. This will enhance the user experience with improvements in infinite scrolling functionality and simplify the record addition with the Add New Row
• The Ribbon offers efficient performance by introducing built-in gallery items and contextual tabs. This will provide quick access to ribbon tabs or items using defined key tips for enhanced navigation.
• The Spreadsheet now supports culture-based argument separators in formulas, recognizing language-specific conventions such as using semicolons in German culture. This feature allows users to pass numeric values with culture-based decimal separators as formula arguments.

WPF

The PDF Viewer has the following updates:

• Users can now effortlessly display, delete, and add new signatures within a PDF document, enhancing document security and efficiency.
• Users can correct mistakes and revert changes to form field elements in PDF documents using undo and redo functionalities.
• Users can easily view custom stamps in appearance streams.

Document-processing libraries

.NET PDF library

• The Syncfusion PDF library now supports the following enhancements:
  • Users can add or modify remote actions that navigate to an external PDF document.
  • Users can easily add links to a specific page or location of another PDF.
  • Effortlessly add signature and timestamp certificates to the PDF Document Security Store (DSS), ensuring greater security and compliance with PDF standards.
• The following enhancements are added in the HTML-to-PDF converter,
  • Upgraded the BlinkBinaries to the latest version, 0.6099.110, to address vulnerabilities and ensure a secure conversion process.
  • Added the timeout option for the HTML-to-PDF conversion process. Users can now easily convert any HTML element to a PDF file by ensuring timely completion with the new timeout option.
  • Added an option to preserve accessibility tags in the input HTML while performing HTML-to-PDF conversion.

.NET Excel library

You can enjoy the following enhancements in chart to image conversion feature in the Syncfusion Excel library:

• Line caps that denote the extremes (Highest and lowest) in the data can be formatted for line charts.
• Line dash style can be modified for line and scatter charts.
• The manually positioned chart titles are preserved.
• The 100% stacked line chart can be converted to an image.
• The axis titles’ text is wrapped.
• The multilevel category labels now render properly.

.NET PowerPoint Library

The .NET PowerPoint library now supports:

• Preserving cropped regions while saving presentations.
• Prevent duplicate master slides and ensure existing ones are reused when merging presentations.

.NET Word library

The Word Library now supports the inclusion of \c and \a switch when updating the Table of Contents (TOC) in a Word document. The purposes of these switches are as follows:

• \c – Includes captions of figures, tables, charts, and other items numbered by SEQ fields in TOC entries.
• \a – Builds a table of captions by excluding caption labels and numbers.

With this feature, you can create a table of figures, charts, and more, giving readers a clear overview of the document’s contents and facilitating more straightforward navigation.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! The features listed here are just highlights of our Essential Studio®^® 2024 Volume 1 release. You can check out all the features in our Release Notes and What’s New pages.

Try out these features and share your feedback as comments on this blog. You can also reach us through our support forums, support portal, or feedback portal.

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