DevExpress VCL Subscription 20.2.2

New Gantt Control (Beta) - The new DevExpress VCL Gantt Control is a powerful project management tool that allows users to schedule activities required to achieve project goals and to monitor their progress. The Gantt Control ships with the following features:

• Three views for project management: Gantt Chart, Resource Sheet, and Timeline.
• Multiple task, dependency, and constraint types.
• Manual and automatic task scheduling.
• Workday and holiday tracking.
• Timescale customization.
• Scroll and zoom options.
• Undo/Redo history.
• Project XML file support.
• DirectX hardware acceleration.

Open/Save File Dialogs (CTP) - This release introduces skinnable DevExpress counterparts for standard VCL Open/Save File dialogs. It inherits the dialogs from the standard VCL Open File dialog to make the replacement of standard dialogs as easy as changing a class name.

UX Enhancements

• Smooth Scrolling - This release adds smooth scrolling support to the following DevExpress VCL components:
  • Grid Control.
  • TreeList Control.
  • Vertical Grid Control.
  • Layout Control.
  • NavBar Control.
  • PDF Viewer.
  • Flow Chart Control.
  • Org Chart Control.
  • Image Slider Control.
  • Scroll Box Control.
  • Image Editor.
  • Print Preview.
• Content Padding Options - With this release, the VCL Grid, TreeList, Pivot Grid, and Vertical Grid controls introduce a quick way to pad their in-place editors and/or headers and adjust the spacing between certain UI elements. Use the new TdxVisualRefinements.Padding and TdxVisualRefinements.HeaderPadding class properties to specify the padding for each side of an element.
• New Display Style for Filter Criteria - The Filter Box available in the VCL Grid, TreeList, and Vertical Grid controls now supports a new visual style displayed in the image below. This style helps end-users easily differentiate between colorized filter items, modify or clear individual filter conditions.

Grid Control

• Custom Row Layouts in Table and Banded Table Views (CTP) - Custom row layouts allow users to arrange cells in a way similar to the one Layout View provides, with numerous customization options available at design and runtime.
• Performance Enhancements
  • Content is rendered up to two times faster.
  • Layout calculations in Banded Table Views are up to three times faster.
  • OnGetFilterValues event handlers almost instantly populate filter dropdowns with items.
  • Lookup column values are sorted 30% faster.

Spreadsheet

• Ability to obtain document metadata, modify and save the changes you made to it.
• New built-in dialogs that allow users to manage defined names.

Rich Edit

• New Document Server Component - This release includes a non-visual Rich Edit component that can load, edit, process, and export documents without end-user interaction. The new component has the same edit capabilities as the Rich Edit Control with fewer dependencies and no UI, so you can utilize the component in console applications.
• Miscellaneous Enhancements
  • Documents are loaded faster by one-third, while consuming 20-60% less memory.
  • Load methods now automatically detect a document's format.
  • Content scroll operations consume less memory.
  • The Rich Edit components allow you to add support for specific document formats from the context menu.

PDF Viewer

• Digital Signature Support - A new SignatureOptions property set allows you to obtain information about digital signatures in a document and to sign it with an X.509 certificate.
• Encryption and Protection - Use the new SecurityOptions property set to encrypt a document, enforce password protection, and manage user access permissions.
• Save Functionality (Beta) and Editable Metadata - New methods allow you to save a document with the changes you made to its metadata, security and signature settings.

Layout Control

• Performance Enhancements in Customization Mode
  • Selection is updated 25 times faster than in previous versions.
  • The optimized drag-and-drop operations make the UI more responsive and accelerate layout calculations by 30%.
• Miscellaneous Enhancements
  • The SizeOptions.MaxWidth and SizeOptions.MaxHeight properties now operate as dimension constraints in layout items and groups.
  • Ability to shorten long element captions with an ellipsis and specify its position.

NavBar Control

• Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) Support - Each NavBar element now creates an MSAA tree node that exposes the UI structure and other information to accessibility tools (MSAA clients). An active screen reader (for instance, Microsoft Narrator) reads these nodes when an end-user navigates between UI elements.

Miscellaneous

• Callout Popup Control - Flyout Panel Style - The Callout Popup control can optionally stretch across its owner - a form or another control. This allows you to mimic flyout panels and auto-hide toolbars.
• Gallery Control - Drag and Drop Support - Internal and external drag-and-drop operations are fully supported. Users can drag and drop items within a group, between groups and gallery controls.
• Image Picker Enhancements
  • You can now temporarily keep selected images in a specially designed box before you close the Image Picker and add them to an image list.
  • You can now open a particular image's location in Microsoft Windows File Explorer.
• Entity Model Designer - Sort Operations
  • Extended context menus with items that allow you to sort elements in the Database Browser, Model Browser, and Diagram windows.
  • Added support for TVirtualImageList images to per-monitor DPI-aware applications.
  • The cloud storage component now allows you to manage access permissions to files and folders on Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive cloud services.