Syncfusion is excited to roll out the third major release of the year: Essential Studio 2023 Volume 3. This release is packed with highly demanded, exciting new controls and features on all platforms. All the bug fixes completed before the code freeze are also included.
Here’s a brief description of the major highlights for each platform.
.NET MAUI
- The following nine new controls are now included in our .NET MAUI suite in preview mode:
- Button: A custom button control. Its built-in features include UI customization, support for icons, predefined styles, rounded corners, and visual state customization using the Visual State Manager.
- CheckBox: A selection control that allows users to select one or more options from a set. The three states of a checkbox are checked, unchecked, and indeterminate.
- Date Picker: A selection control that allows users to select a date from a list of dates. It can be opened as a dialog. Its rich feature set includes date ranges, date formats, headers, and footers.
- Date Time Picker: A customizable selection control that allows users to pick a date and time from a list of date-time values. It can also be opened as a dialog. Its rich feature set includes functionalities such as data binding, multiple columns, headers, footers, and custom views in headers and footers.
- Picker: A customizable selection control that allows users to pick an item from a list. It can be opened as a dialog. Its rich feature set includes data binding, multiple columns, headers, footers, and custom views in headers and footers.
- Radio Button: A selection control that allows users to select one option from a set. The two states of a radio button are checked and unchecked.
- Segmented Control: A linear UI element that consists of multiple segments, where each segment functions as a separate button that can display text, an image, or both.
- Time Picker: A selection control that allows users to pick a time. This control can be opened as a dialog. Its rich feature set includes functionalities such as time formats, headers, and footers.
- TreeView: A data-oriented control that displays data in a hierarchical structure. It provides a user-friendly way to interact with complex data structures and navigate through different levels of information by allowing users to expand and collapse nodes to reveal or hide underlying information.
- The .NET MAUI PDF Viewer now supports four different types of annotations: text markup, stamp, shape, and sticky note.
- The following .NET MAUI controls have been developed to meet industry standards and are now marked as production-ready in this release:
Flutter
- The Flutter DataGrid has a new feature that enhances the user experience. When you hover over a column header, intuitive icons for filtering and sorting will appear, allowing you to perform these actions quickly. Once you have filtered or sorted a particular column, these icons will remain visible, indicating the action taken.
- The Flutter PDF Viewer includes the following new features:
- Easily access and edit list box fields in PDF forms.
- Access and make changes to form data in PDFs programmatically. Additionally, this feature offers the flexibility to limit the editing of specific form fields.
Xamarin
- The Xamarin.Forms PDF Viewer receives the following new features:
- Text search in rotated text and documents.
- Render borders for document link annotations.
- GoTo action button for form fields, allowing users to easily navigate to a specific page in a PDF.
Blazor
- The Blazor DataGrid now offers more advanced features, such as infinite scrolling to load a huge volume of data efficiently, a GraphQL adapter for fetching data and performing grid actions from GraphQL services, and virtual scrolling with overscan to pre-render extra rows before and after the viewport of the grid.
- The Blazor PDF Viewer component is now production-ready and delivers enhanced performance.
- The Blazor DatePicker, TimePicker, DateTime Picker, and DateRangePicker components now offer a full calendar view option for full-screen viewing on mobile devices.
- The Blazor Gantt Chart supports a multi-taskbar feature in the resource view, which makes it easier to visualize multiple tasks assigned to each resource in a row. The user interface for taskbar editing is also enhanced by displaying a clone element when moving or resizing a
- The Blazor Image Editor component now supports resizing images, annotating images, and drawing frames on images.
- The performance of the Blazor Pivot Table component has been improved, especially in Blazor WebAssembly. The component also provides template support to customize the data label content for each data point in the Pivot Chart.
- Users can now pass appointments (events) dynamically through data virtualization in Blazor Scheduler, which improves the component’s performance and usability.
Essential JS 2
- The AutoComplete, ComboBox, and Dropdown List components now support virtual scrolling. This helps when navigating a huge list by not loading all items at once.
- The Charts component receives the following updates:
- Display data as cylindrical-shaped items in column or bar charts.
- Synchronize tooltips, zooming, panning, crosshairs, highlight, and selection features across multiple charts.
- Add background and border styles to the chart’s titles and subtitles.
- Export chart data to an Excel file in a table format.
- Export charts to multiple pages within a PDF document.
- The Word Processor component provides support to add or modify titles and descriptions in tables in Word documents. This feature enhances accessibility for users who are blind or have low vision.
- The File Manager component allows users to customize toolbar items with icons, text, and tooltips.
- The Gantt Chart receives the following new features:
- Load data on demand from remote web services as needed for better performance.
- Export Gantt Chart data to a PDF file in a single-page format.
- Include baseline taskbars while exporting Gantt Chart data to PDF.
- The DataGrid provides these user-friendly features:
- Lock columns in place while scrolling horizontally.
- Export multiple grids to page-level Excel and PDF files.
- Export grids with column, detail, and group caption templates.
- The Image Editor component includes these features:
- Insert and display multiple image annotations in addition to the main image.
- Adjust the image size and dimensions.
- Add decorative borders or frames around images.
- The PDF Viewer component now allows you to view, edit, print, and download PDF files without a web service dependency.
- The Ribbon (Preview) component now supports:
- Grouping multiple button items with single or multiple selections.
- Displaying application settings, user information, and more.
- The Rich Text Editor now streamlines text editing with a quick format toolbar, offering built-in and customizable items.
- The new features of the Scheduler component include:
- Support to retrieve events on demand from remote services for the current view, enhancing
- Support to customize the header and footer of the built-in editor window.
WinUI
- The new WinUI Shimmer control can be used to increase an app’s responsiveness by displaying a shimmer effect while content is loading or processing in the background.
- A NoResultsFound template in the WinUI AutoComplete control allows users to display text indicating that no search results were found.
- The WinUI Ribbon control supports the following new features:
- The quick-access toolbar (QAT) allows users to render a set of Ribbon items that are commonly used in apps at the top-left corner of a window to make them more accessible. Users can also choose to place the QAT above or below the R
- Screen tips display a pop-up window when the pointer hovers over a Ribbon item. They provide helpful details about the function of the Ribbon item.
WPF
- You can now use the Syncfusion WPF Template Studio extension for Visual Studio to streamline your WPF app creation with Syncfusion controls.
- The Syncfusion WPF item templates support for Visual Studio has been enhanced to seamlessly incorporate Syncfusion controls and their robust features directly into WPF windows. This enhancement simplifies the development process.
- The WPF Diagram control supports these new vivid features:
- Users can duplicate stencil symbols by dragging them while holding the Ctrl key. This is possible within the same symbol group and across different symbol groups. Users can clone symbols from one group and paste them into another.
- Users can customize the selection mode (Single or multiple ) for the symbols in the stencil.
- The WPF Spreadsheet control includes built-in theme support for its forms and dialog boxes.
- The WPF PDF Viewer now supports:
- Deleting annotations on a specific page or throughout the entire PDF document.
- Showing or hiding annotations and form fields on PDF pages.
Document-Processing Libraries
.NET PDF library
The Syncfusion PDF library now supports the following enhancements:
- The new PDF-to-image converter library converts PDF documents to images without opening the document in the PDF Viewer control. It also supports various customizations, such as setting a transparent background and removing annotations from a specific page or range of pages.
- The following enhancements have been made to PDF digital signatures:
- An API to get the OCSP/CRL details from the embedded timestamp.
- Extract images from the digital signature in the PDF document.
- Users can selectively redact text within a PDF document. This means that graphics or images beneath redacted text will remain unaffected. This is particularly useful when users wish to conceal text overlaid on an image without impacting the image in any way.
- Users now have the option to eliminate document details like title, author, subject, keywords, and other metadata information.
- Users can obtain image rotation angles from the OCR processor after performing OCR on a PDF document. With this functionality, users can easily identify rotated images within the PDF and make necessary adjustments to straighten them.
- The following enhancements have been made in the HTML-to-PDF converter:
- Users can add HTML content as a header and footer.
- Users can now include their own custom CSS and JS styles while converting HTML content to PDF format.
- BlinkBinaries has been updated to version 114.0.5735.199 for Windows, Linux, and Mac devices.
- Users can recycle the browser process between conversions to improve performance during HTML-to-PDF conversion.
.NET Excel library
The Syncfusion Excel library now supports the following features:
- What-if analysis with a scenario manager for forecasting results. You can create scenarios with different sets of values for specific cells in a worksheet, and then apply those scenarios to see how the results change.
- Threaded comments allow multiple users to add comments or reply to existing comments in an Excel worksheet. This feature is useful for collaborating on Excel documents and getting feedback from others.
- Gradient fill support for data bars in Excel-to-PDF conversion.
- Auto shapes support in Excel-to-image conversion.
.NET Word library
The Syncfusion Word Library now allows you to compare two DOCX-format documents and highlight the changes, such as insertions, deletions, and formatting, as tracked changes. With this feature, you can easily identify the changes between two versions of a document.
.NET PowerPoint library
The Syncfusion PowerPoint library now allows you to convert PowerPoint slides into images based on the sequence of entrance animations applied to each element in the slide. With this feature, you can showcase the converted images as a slideshow in a custom PowerPoint viewer.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! The features listed here are just some of the highlights of our Essential Studio 2023 Volume 3 release. You can check out all the features in our Release Notes and the 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.
