dynamics-community-at: NAV2013: Reporting: Does (not) support fields in Header and Footers

[Blog bot]

 

Hi all,

Few months are gone since NAV 2013 beta is available. I think it takes only some more weeks until Microsoft will release it, also if I really don’t know it and I really be happy if it will be finally available.

Anyway. I am currently doing partner readiness since many weeks and there is one question which every time coming up when teaching new stuff in Reporting and NAV 2013.

Is it supported now to put fields from the dataset directly into header and footers?

and the answer is  YES AND NO!

Well for me it is important to blog about this because the answer is not very difficult to understand, if you every have tried to create a report in NAV 2013.

Lets do the some “inquisition”:

Q: NAV 2013 was moving to RDLC 2008, right? 

A: YES

Q: RDLC 2008 is supporting new features like gauge control, HTML tags, fields from dataset directly in headers and footer

A: YES

Q: Does this mean that a typically NAV document report 206 sales invoice will not longer need SetData and GetData function?

A: YES AND NO!!

Explanation:

If you are building a report like this, with a structure like in  NAV 2009, you still have to use GetData and SetData function.  The reason is that you are now allowed to put fields from the dataset directly into header and footers, but you cant use any tablix (table, list, matrix) control there.

So there will be no iteration of records and you will get always the “same” (first, last, or any other (aggregate) function) record in header and/or footers!

Q: But then, what is the improvement?

A: If you are thinking on a typically footer of a document, there is very often the company information included. Related to this it is very easy now to put the fields from the company information directly into the footer because there exists only one record!  

So, if you can be sure that you will only print invoice per invoice – so one by one – you can also use the fields from the customer in the header/footer, because only one record will exist.

If not, you have to do some workaround: This could be to use a batch report which is starting the document report and  printing more than one invoice after another. But to be honestly not a very smart workaround…

Q: Do you have any other ideas to create document reports in NAV without using GetData and SetData?

2 more additional improvements:

1. Using the structure of the body as a header – like it is in the Reminder report in  Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Decide yourself if this “is the better solution..”

2. RDLC 2008 is supporting HTML tags directly from the report. This means you are able to create a company specific header (or Footer) in HTML – store it in a BLOB, and print it. The advantage of this is, if there is something to change, you only have to change the HTML one time and all the document reports will be updated “automatically”. AND YES HTML tag interpretation is supported in headers and footers.

 

Hopefully this post will resolve some misunderstandings related to NAV 2013 and RDLC 2008.



Далее