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Reports can now have computed columns which are the product of a formula similar to a spreadsheet. For instance, you may want to show the percent of two other columns, such as ROUND(gross_gain_loss / cost_basis * 100, 1) which would be entered in the Computed option for a new column called gross_percent with format Percent on the Column Properties page. Although you could simply have your SQL statement output this percent column directly, you may want to have this percent shown in the totals line of the report, which would have to be computed using the totals of gross_gain_loss and cost_basis. Only arithmetic and a few text functions are allowed in the formula so this feature is of limited use outside of this percent example and putting as much logic as possible in the SQL statement is still preferred.

You can now generate an extra row on any Ad Hoc Report that shows the count, total, percent, minimum, maximum or average of the values in one or more columns via the new Aggregation option on the Column Properties page. Only columns containing numeric data can be aggregated. And the totals row will always appear as the last line of a filtered or sorted report and is not exported so your spreadsheets will still work as expected.

When an Ad Hoc Report is expected to always return no more than a thousand or so rows, rather than breaking-up the results into pages you can now specify that all of the results should be displayed each time the report is run by checking the No Pagination box on the SQL Statement page under Additional Report Options. Note that the RESULT_SET_LIMIT in the configuration file still applies but you would definitely want any report that large to be paginated anyway.

Ad Hoc Reports now support an auto-submit option on any filter in the left side panel, which simply means that as soon as a filter value is entered, checked or selected the report will refresh without having to click the Go button. However, if your site is a little on the slow side, you will not want to use this feature except in very limited circumstances and only if there are just a very few filters for the report. But for internal applications, having the select filters in particular refresh the page automatically is very snappy, even if other filters need to be checked. The new AutoSubmit option is located next to the other filter options on the Column Properties page.

HTML5 Semantic tags are now being generated within the framework. Although these tags provide little technical benefit, it may help performance rendering a page in the future. Unfortunately, because of browser compatibility issues with dynamically generated content, the framework still relies on table tags for basic layout, within the context of the semantic tags.

System Administrators will notice a new feature for exporting all of the properties of an Ad Hoc Report as a SQL script which can then be manually run in MySQL to recreate that report in another framework installation. For instance, you may want to copy a report from production to your development environment. Or you may need to prepare a report to be checked into a repository for later deployment into production as part of a scheduled release.