Design

The Designer is called by the Design method and will be displayed as a modal pop-up window that overlaps your application window. A data source always has to be assigned beforehand. This is the basis for the data available in the Designer. Therefore, there is no stand-alone design application; the data is always provided directly by the application, List & Label itself never directly accesses the data.

The full call – with a DataSet as data source in this example – would be:

ListLabel LL = new ListLabel();
LL.DataSource = CreateDataSet();
LL.Design();
LL.Dispose();

By default, a file selection dialog is displayed to the user, where he can either provide a new name for the report file and therefore create a new report or select an existing file for editing. Of course, this can also be suppressed – the section Important Properties of the Component describes how to do that.

Using the Designer itself is explained in detail in the corresponding online help and in the Designer manual. The result of the design process is generally four files that are created by the Designer. The file extensions can be assigned freely by using the FileExtensions property of the ListLabel component. The following table describes the files for the default case.

File	Content
<Reportname>.lst	The actual project file. It contains information about the formatting of the data to print, but not the data itself.
< Reportname >.lsv	A JPEG file with a sketch/thumbnail of the project for display in the file selection dialog.
< Reportname >.lsp	File with user-specific printer and export settings. This file should not be redistributed if the design computer is not identical with the print computer as the printer stored in the file usually does not exist.
< Reportname >.~lst	Is created as soon as the project is saved for the second time within the Designer and contains a backup of the project file.

The most important file is of course the project file. The other files will automatically be created by List & Label at application runtime.

At print time the actual report is created by the combination of project file and data source. In practice it is often also desired to keep the project files in a central database. How this is done is described in section Store Project Files in a Database.