New Report designer

TonyH

Hi all,

Just wanted to gauge peoples opinions of the new Report Tool in NAV RTC?

I personally find it difficult and time consuming to use and am reverting back to Classic Reports before I blow project budgets up...

t

ara3n

I would say people didn't budgeted it correctly.

TonyH

Aran,

Thanks for your input, however I was looking for some opinions on usability of the new reporting tool in Visual Studio.

I appreciate your comment on budgets however, which is certainly something I will look at in future.

t

kine

Each time you are using some new tool you will spend more time that you thought to finish something. I love the tool. Even when I have no real chance to use it in live (NAV 2009 still not available in our country). But if you look e.g. on NAV Reporting blog, you can see what you can do with the tool and how you can do it...

see http://blogs.msdn.com/nav-reporting/

TonyH

For sure, my take on it is that it would still take more time to complete a report change than perhaps you would find with the classic report designer. This coupled with the extra time I believe pages would take to modify/build could in the long run (and dependant on project size) increased the services time needed for an implementation. Does this take away from the RAD capability that NAV is so well know for?

There is no doubt in my mind that the Report Viewer in VS is an excellent product, but the current fit with NAV is not exactly perfect, I think I would be a little more content if they could close that gap a little more...

t

kine

Ok, it depends... imagine e.g. modification of report with table design with the lines bweteen fields with many sections because different formats of fields etc. Now compare speed of change in classic client and in the RDLC... ;-)

To create and maintain classic report will take long time to novice as well as you the modification of RDLC, but after some time, you will find out that you can be more productive in RDLC than now (you can make "bigger" functionality from customer's point of view with less time).

DenSter

TonyH wrote:

Does this take away from the RAD capability that NAV is so well know for?

Yes absolutely, developing for the RTC is definately not as easy as for the classic client, and I would definately agree that the RAD capability has been severely limited. It is more complex to build even simple solutions, and testing takes much more time because of limited debugging. Reports can look really awesome, but there is a very steep learning curve to use the Visual Studio report designer properly. Even if you know how to use it properly, it takes much longer to create reports.