ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 183

ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 183

The NAV community, including the ArcherPoint technical staff, is made up of developers, project managers, and consultants who are constantly communicating, with the common goal of  sharing helpful information with one another to help customers be more successful.

As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them on blogs, forums, social media…so everyone can benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this community—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share this great information with everyone who might not have the time to check out the multitude of resources out there? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from NAV experts and devotees around the world. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.

Creating and Editing Dynamics NAV 2018 RDLC Reports

Kyle wants to know about creating and editing RDLC reports in Dynamics NAV 2018. He shares the NAV 2018 system requirements for creating and editing RDLC report layouts as either Report Builder for SQL Server 2016 or one of the versions of Visual Studio.

He asks, “Have any of you attempted to do reports in Report Builder for SQL Server 2016 rather than VS?”

Matt T. replies, “Yes, all of the time when the customer doesn’t have Visual Studio. I haven’t found anything I couldn’t do yet. Granted I’m not exactly creating a lot of reports day to day.”

Michael H. states, “I’ve used Report Builder quite often over the past few years. There’s a couple of things Visual Studio does that make it nicer, but overall Report Builder is very usable.”

Saravanan adds, “We used either in older NAV versions, but in Report Builder there is one thing I don’t like, which is that it will not show the line numbers for the datasets that we keep in Textboxes. For example, in Base Sales Invoice or any document report you will find the hidden textbox as a container to keep all page header stuff behind, and in Report Builder you need to copy those and paste in Word to be able to find it.”

Kyle replies, “I do not like those hidden textbox things and do everything I possibly can to avoid (or remove) them.”

Editing Default Reports for Sales Reports in Dynamics NAV

Bill asks, “In NAV 2017 the default reports for Sales Documents has changed from the old 10074, 10075, etc. reports to new “Standard Sales” reports (1303-1307). The DefaultLayout is set to Word. By default what would you edit? The Word layout? There are now four of them that you can use. It seems like going down the road of editing Word layouts and having to promote them through databases could be a nightmare. What is everyone else doing?”

Len responds, “The nice thing they added is the ability for customers to do their own modifications to reports by using custom report layouts. When it comes to customers, it is usually much easier for them to use Word than to use RDLC. For that reason, I have seen that customers implemented in our cloud are using the Word layouts. There are certain limitations to Word layouts that we’ve seen, so for some customers we have had to move to RDLC reports. But in any case, it is simple to Export/Import those custom layouts and move to another database. So, it seems they are getting closer to making things easier for customers but like all else, they still have a ways to go. So, for now, we are having customers play with the Word layouts and when they get stuck, we train them. If they want very complex things where Word is getting too difficult, they pay us to create RDLC reports for them or pay for training. Thus far, we have been doing all the RDLC creation.”

Dynamics NAV Development Preview for February 2018

The NAV Development Preview for February 2018 from Microsoft includes synchronize data on F5, adjustable column width in the web client, Intellisense suggestion for the next available object ID, report RDL and Word layout development with AL, integration tables that can be used in extensions, and multi-root support.

Stay abreast of what is new in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV community and at ArcherPoint by subscribing to our monthly newsletter, Better Business, by completing the form in our Resource Center.

If you are interested in NAV development, be sure to see our collection of NAV Development Blogs.

Read the “How To” blogs from ArcherPoint for practical advice on using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

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