What's New in ReportingCloud in 2019

TX Text Control X16 reached ReportingCloud in January 2019, and the year brought plain text output and the last new endpoints: thumbnails of uploaded documents and the processing endpoints for tracked changes. The merge settings gained removeEmptyLines. A status page has reported the availability of the service since April, and the documentation became an open source project.

Changes at a Glance

TX Text Control

• TX Text Control X16 (January 3). The backend, the portal, the template editor and the editor widget moved to TX Text Control X16, version 26.0, which brought more than 100 formulas compatible with Microsoft Excel and the sorting and filtering of merge blocks. See ReportingCloud: Backend Updated to TX Text Control X16.

Web API

• Tracked changes (August 9). A new group of endpoints, processing, works with tracked changes: POST /v1/processing/review/trackedchanges lists the tracked changes of a document, and POST /v1/processing/review/removetrackedchange accepts or rejects one of them. The .NET SDK supports them from version 1.204.500 of the same day, the PHP SDK from version 2.5.0 of September 2, 2019. See Tracked Changes and New Endpoint: Manipulating Tracked Changes in Documents.
• Removing empty lines (May 10). The merge setting removeEmptyLines, false by default, removes lines that hold nothing but empty merge fields. The .NET SDK added the property RemoveEmptyLines in version 1.203.500 of the same day. See Merge Settings and ReportingCloud: New MergeSettings property to remove empty lines.
• Thumbnails of uploaded documents (March 7). POST /v1/document/thumbnails renders the pages of a document sent with the request; before, only stored templates could be rendered, with GET /v1/templates/thumbnails. The .NET SDK added it in version 1.202.500 of March 5, the PHP SDK in version 2.2.0 of March 6. See Thumbnails and New ReportingCloud Endpoint: Creating Document Thumbnails.
• Plain text output (February 20). The return format TXT lets POST /v1/document/convert extract the text of a PDF, DOCX or HTML document. The .NET SDK supports it from version 1.201.500 of February 19, the PHP SDK from version 2.1.0 of February 25. Supported File Formats lists the endpoints that return it; see also ReportingCloud: Extract Plain Text from Adobe PDF, MS Word or HTML Documents.

Service

• Status page (April 9). status.reporting.cloud shows whether the Web API, the portal and the backend are available, and lists reported incidents. See Getting Support and ReportingCloud: Web API Health Status Page.

SDKs

• PHP 7.4 (December 18). PHP SDK 2.6.0 supports PHP 7.4.
• Java and Ruby SDKs (February and March). Both gained the TXT return format and methods for appending documents and for the API key endpoints: the Ruby gem txtextcontrol-reportingcloud in versions 1.2.0 of February 28 and 1.2.1 of March 4, the Java SDK between February 21 and March 4, 2019. See Java and Ruby.
• Binary templates (January 3). In PHP SDK 2.0.2, downloadTemplate returns the template as binary data instead of a Base64 string, which needs a change in code that decoded the result; see Breaking Changes.

Documentation

• ASP.NET Core tutorial (July 24). A quickstart tutorial of the documentation merged a template of the Sample Template Gallery into a PDF document in an ASP.NET Core MVC application. ASP.NET Core is its successor.
• Open source documentation (February 11). The documentation was published as an open source project on GitHub, with an interactive tutorial for a first document from February 19. It is the source of this documentation, and Web API replaces the interactive tutorial. See ReportingCloud: Open Source Documentation Released.

Related Pages

• Web API: every endpoint as it works today.
• 2020: the next year, with the Laminas module of the PHP SDK.
• 2018: the previous year, with TX Text Control X15 and appending documents.