Syncfusion Essential Studio® 2024 Volume 2 Is Here!

Syncfusion is thrilled to unveil the second major release of the year: Essential Studio^® 2024 Volume 2. With eagerly anticipated, captivating new controls and features, this release is set to revolutionize your experience.

Let’s see the extraordinary new updates on each platform.

.NET MAUI

• In the 2024 Volume 2 release, we introduce the new .NET MAUI Digital Gauge control in preview mode.

• The Cartesian Charts control now supports the following features:
  • Trackball enhancement: Users can enhance their charts by adding various views to the trackball, grouping all data points, and displaying their labels at the chart’s top.
  • Smart axis label support: You can handle overlapping axis labels by placing them in multiple rows, wrapping them, or hiding them as necessary.
• The Circular Charts control allows you to arrange data labels by adjusting their positions or hiding them to prevent overlapping and intersections.
• The Autocomplete and ComboBox controls now support delimiters, allowing users to separate multiple selected items with a custom character for a clear and organized display. Additionally, the Autocomplete control now supports text highlight mode, making it easier to identify and select desired items by highlighting matching characters in the suggestion list.
• The DataGrid control supports the following features:
  • Column drag and drop: Users can reorder columns directly within the UI, offering greater flexibility and ease of use.
  • Row header: Now, you can display a row label or additional information related to each row, improving data context and readability.
• The PDF Viewer supports:
  • Built-in toolbar: Easily access common tools used for operations such as reviewing with annotations, text searching, and bookmark navigation.
  • Page zoom modes: Users can view PDF files in different page zoom modes, such as fit-width and fit-page.
• The Calendar control can now appear in various formats, including a pop-up window, a dialog box, or a relative dialog.
• The Scheduler now supports:
  • Vertical month view swiping: Users can navigate through calendar data with vertical swiping.
  • Agenda appointment template: You can customize the visual representation of agenda appointments by defining data templates and enhancing usability within the application.

Flutter

• The Charts control now supports the following features:

• • Rate of Change (ROC) indicator: A momentum oscillator assessing price change speed over time.
  • Weighted Moving Average (WMA): A technical indicator that smooths price data to identify market trends.

• The PDF Viewer supports these powerful features:
  • Page rendering enhancements: Improved quality and performance, with an 80% reduction in rendering time for large documents on web and Android platforms.
  • Horizontal scrolling in Right-to-left (RTL) rendering: Allows horizontal scrolling in RTL layouts for better readability.
  • Customize the visibility of the text selection menu: Users can design their own text selection menu.

• The PDF library now supports the following features:
  • Timestamp support: Now, you can add a secure timestamp to PDF signatures, ensuring authenticity and integrity at the time of signing for added security and compliance.
  • Long-Term Validation (LTV) support: Digital signatures now include LTV, keeping them valid even if the original certificate expires or is revoked. This ensures long-term verifiability, enhancing trust and reliability.

Blazor

• The Syncfusion Blazor components seamlessly support Fluent 2. This lets you create UIs with a complete set of customization options readily available through the Syncfusion Blazor Theme Studio.
• In this release, we’ve introduced the following new Blazor components in preview mode:
  • 3D Charts: Visualizes data in three dimensions, showcasing relationships and trends among variables. Unlike traditional 2D charts, 3D charts add depth to the visualization, supporting better comprehension of data patterns.

• • OTP Input: A form component used to input one-time passwords (OTP) during multifactor authentication processes. It provides extensive customization options, allowing users to change input types, placeholders, separators, and more.
  • TextArea: A fundamental input element in web development. It allows users to input multiple lines of text within a designated area, such as comments, messages, or other lengthy content. This control is an extended version of the HTML text area element and features a floating label, various sizing options, validation states, a clear icon, and more.
• The Blazor Timeline component meets industry standards and is now marked as production-ready.
• The Blazor components offer full compatibility with the newest .NET 9 previews.
• The Image Editor component supports continuous drawing of multiple annotations, z-order rendering, and saving images with better quality.
• The PDF Viewer is enhanced with performance, custom stamp, customizable date and time formats, and multiline comments.

Essential JS 2

• In the 2024 Volume 2 release, we introduce the following Essential JS 2 components in preview mode:
  • MultiColumn ComboBox: A dropdown control that displays items in a table-like structure with multiple columns, providing comprehensive data and context beyond typical single-string text lists.

  • OTP Input: A form component used to input one-time passwords (OTP) during multifactor authentication processes. It provides extensive customization options, allowing users to change input types, placeholders, separators, and more.

• The Word Processor now supports rich text, plain text, dropdown lists, combo boxes, date pickers, check boxes, and image insertion for dynamic document editing.

• The Charts component has rolled out these new updates:
  • Animation on data update: Smooth animations for adding, removing, or updating data in all chart types, from the line to financial charts.
  • Click to add or remove points: Add or remove data points based on pointer coordinates.

• The Dropdown components (AutoComplete, ComboBox, Dropdown List, and more) can now disable or enable items based on specific scenarios. Users cannot interact with the disabled items or select them as values within the components.
• The File Manager can render flat data as JSON arrays without AJAX requests.
• The Gantt Chart delivers the following new features:

• • Timeline template: Customize timeline cells with templates.
  • Different working time ranges: Define varying work hours for different weekdays.
  • Improvements in error handling: Enhanced actionFailure event for better diagnostics.

• The DataGrid comes with the following features:

• • ODataV4 routing convention: Enhances the DataManager ODataV4 Adaptor to support users’ custom action methods alongside the default GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE methods. This feature facilitates performing CRUD operations by invoking custom action methods when binding the ODataV4 service to the Grid.
  • Performance improvement: Significant enhancements for lazy load grouping and sorting.

• The PDF Viewer includes enhancements in organizing pages, allowing you to move, copy, undo, and redo changes.

• The Query Builder supports the following new features:

• • Drag-and-drop support: Reposition rules or groups effortlessly.
  • Separate connector: This feature enables users to integrate standalone connectors between rules or groups within the same group. This allows for greater flexibility, as users can connect rules or groups using different connectors, enhancing the complexity and precision of query construction.

• The Spreadsheet now supports:

• • Notes: Add, edit, and delete cell notes.
  • Print: Print active worksheets or entire workbooks with customizable options.
  • JSON serialization: Extract cell values without formatting or formulas.

WPF

• The Syncfusion WPF controls now support Material 3 light and dark themes.
• The Gantt Chart control now includes row reordering via drag-and-drop, filtering with an Excel-inspired UI, sorting columns by clicking headers, and theming support to customize the appearance of the Gantt grid, schedule, and chart.
• The Diagram control includes context menu support for symbol groups, a position indicator in the ruler to show the current pointer position and shortcut key support for selecting, moving, and deleting stencil symbols.
• The PDF Viewer now provides support for adding, editing, and deleting comments on annotations within PDF documents.
• The Scheduler includes an appointment tooltip that shows additional details on hover and a cell padding feature that adds space between appointments and cell borders. Right-side padding is provided for day and month views, and bottom-side padding is provided for timeline views.

Document-processing libraries

.NET PDF Library

The Syncfusion .NET PDF Library now supports the following enhancements:

• Merge PDFs without compromising accessibility: Users can merge PDF documents while maintaining accessibility for screen readers and other assistive technologies.
• Pop-up icon appearance: You can add various pop-up icons to PDF documents, including custom icons with unique appearances using appearance streams.
• Duplicate page: Users can duplicate pages within the same PDF for easy content replication, template creation, and consistent organization.

.NET Excel Library

The Syncfusion .NET Excel Library now supports the following new features:

• Chart-to-image enhancement: Error bars in charts are preserved when converting charts-to-images, aiding in statistical analysis by measuring data variability and deviation.
• Pivot table enhancement: The show values row option is available in pivot table creation and Excel-to-PDF conversion, allowing users to add a Values row when multiple data fields exist.
• Gradient fill: Support for gradient fill style in conditional formatting enhances the appearance and highlights data in reports with large datasets during Excel document creation and Excel-to- PDF conversion.

.NET Word Library

The .NET Word Library delivers the following features:

• Mathematical equation to LaTeX: Extract LaTeX code from mathematical equations in Word documents. Users can also modify equations using LaTeX code, enabling easy integration with LaTeX-based equation editors.
• Word-to-PDF and image conversion enhancements:
  • Right-to-left text: Enhanced rendering to preserve right-to-left text direction in columns and table of contents.
  • Mathematical equations: Improved preservation of equations and their alignments during conversion.
  • Chart error bars: Exact preservation of error bars while converting charts-to-PDF or images.

.NET PowerPoint Library

The .NET PowerPoint Library is rolled out with the following new features:

• Paragraph end mark: Access font properties of the paragraph end mark in PowerPoint slides via API.
• PDF and image conversion enhancements:
  • Preserve highlight colors: Maintain highlight colors during PowerPoint-to-PDF or image conversion.
  • Chart error bars: Preserves error bars as they appear in the original presentation when converting to PDF or images.
  • Note rendering: Use the notes-publishing option to improve the rendering of slides with notes that exceed a page when converting to PDF.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! The features listed here are just highlights of our Essential Studio^® 2024 Volume 2 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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