Aug 19

Written by: Michael Washington
8/19/2012 2:53 PM 

With the release of Visual Studio LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2012, ComponentOne has updated and released their Studio for LightSwitch.

Studio for LightSwitch consists of the following components: Chart, FlexGrid, OLAP, PDFViewer, RichTextBox, and Scheduler. Some of the components have previously been covered on this site in the following articles:

• A Groundbreaking Control - ComponentOne Scheduler LightSwitch Extension
• Using OLAP for LightSwitch
• Using the ComponentOne FlexGrid Control in Visual Studio LightSwitch

In this article we will examine the components that we have not previously looked at.

Download And Install

The first thing you will want to do is download and install Studio for LightSwitch.

You can view the live demonstration of the the controls at the following link:

http://demo.componentone.com/lightswitch/studio/.

You can also download the sample project(s) to see the source code:

VS 2012 Sample Project

VS 2010 Sample Project

When you open the sample project you may need to go into properties and check the box next to each extension to enable it.

If you do not see the extensions you must install them first using the installer.

PDF Viewer

The PDF Viewer component is very simple. It essentially displays PDF’s. It has the following features:

• View PDF Files
• Load and Save Documents
• Printing Support
• Find Text
• Multiple View Modes

The following links describe the basic functionality:

• A Simple PdfViewer Application
• Adding a PDF from a File System

Chart

The Chart extensions allows you to easily display charts in LightSwitch. It has the following features:

• 30+ Chart Types
  • Get the exact chart representation you need for your LightSwitch application by choosing from over 30 popular 2D chart types. Available chart types include line, scatter, bar, column, pie, area and many more.
• Customization is easy
  • Chart includes 12 built-in themes and 22 built-in palettes. Combine themes with different palettes to effortlessly make an endless combination of looks.
• Tooltips
  • Optionally display data values over chart elements as tooltips.
• Multiple Series
  • Define multiple data series at design time by making the corresponding numeric elements visible.
    

To use it, you simply add a collection to the Screen.

Next, you change the control to C1Chart.

Finally you configure the options.

Rich Text Box

The differentiating component in my opinion is the Rich Text Box. The Rich Text Box has the following features:

• Inserting pictures
• Search and replace
• Spell-check
• Undo/Redo Support
• Clipboard Support

When using the ComponentOne FlexGrid control you can even allow in cell rich text editing.

The content of the Rich Text Box is also transmitted through OData.

When we place the contents in a HTML file…

 

We see that all the formatting, and even the pictures are contained in the HTML text.