NAV 2013 report wizard

Rob_Hansen

It doesn't look like there's a report creation wizard in NAV2013. Does anyone know if there will be in the final release? While it's not rocket science to create a basic report, it's nice and quick to come up with a starting point using the wizard. I'm hoping the final release will have a wizard to quickly create the primary data item field list, and also set up the initial RDLC layout. Can anyone comment on this?

Marije_Brummel

There were idea's to add this but I don't know if it made it into the final product.

Maybe Clausl is reading this and share what he know's.

Alex_Chow

From what I understand, the time was opted to improve the report transformation tool instead of the report wizard. Which, to this day, I still believe is a bad move.

ara3n

I think it was a good move. There will be a lot more customer upgrading to 7. Most developer can build a simple report in 2013 in 10 minutes.

Alex_Chow

ara3n wrote:

I think it was a good move. There will be a lot more customer upgrading to 7. Most developer can build a simple report in 2013 in 10 minutes.

When you upgrade custom reports, it takes more time to tweak the report than if you were to create it from scratch.

Rob_Hansen

I agree with Alex on the upgrade vs. recreate comment.

For new implementations (and new reports for existing clients that move to NAV 2013), it's a shame to not have some tool to create a starting point layout....even if just to get the standard headers and basic structure in place. That really is brainless work that should be automatic. I foresee a lot of going to other report layouts and copying tables as a starting point, then pasting them onto the new report and adjusting them. (I assume you can copy elements from one report layout and paste onto another?)

I suppose we'll end up creating a base template report as a starting point for any new reports that has a single data item, and the columns/code in place to set the report caption, date, time, company information - name, USERID, etc. I'll be hoping there is a wizard added in NAV 2013 R2.

Alex_Chow

rdhansen wrote:

I agree with Alex on the upgrade vs. recreate comment.

For new implementations (and new reports for existing clients that move to NAV 2013), it's a shame to not have some tool to create a starting point layout....even if just to get the standard headers and basic structure in place. That really is brainless work that should be automatic. I foresee a lot of going to other report layouts and copying tables as a starting point, then pasting them onto the new report and adjusting them. (I assume you can copy elements from one report layout and paste onto another?)

I suppose we'll end up creating a base template report as a starting point for any new reports that has a single data item, and the columns/code in place to set the report caption, date, time, company information - name, USERID, etc. I'll be hoping there is a wizard added in NAV 2013 R2.

The question was posed at the last Directions. Most partners in attendence preferred to have a good transformation rather than a reporting wizard. By the reaction and the responses of the partners, I immediately knew that most partners had not even adopted the new RTC.

I was incredibly disappointed because I knew once the partners get a taste of what it's like to upgrade reports, they'll wish they had voted to create the wizard instead.

Alex_Chow

One additional thing on this is that the transformation tool does not add the new reporting features that customers love when they saw the reporting demo.

My case to Microsoft was that the customer is not going to find value having the SOS moving over to the new upgrade. They want the nice awesome version, which should be part of the wizard report creation process.

I'm still a little upset that the transformation tool was chosen instead of the reporting wizard, so please excuse me for ranting.

DenSter

I actually agree with that, I thought it would be more important to make creating reports in NAV 2013 easier, and I voted for the wizard. The overwhelming majority voted for transformation though, so you can't say MSFT didn't listen.

Alex_Chow

DenSter wrote:

I actually agree with that, I thought it would be more important to make creating reports in NAV 2013 easier, and I voted for the wizard. The overwhelming majority voted for transformation though, so you can't say MSFT didn't listen.

Daniel agreeing with me? What's this world coming to?!?!

Again, my impression leaving that conference is that 90% of the partners have not adopted the RTC so they're making decisions and suggestions based on false information and assumptions.

I hope NAV2013SP1 will include a really nice reporting wizard that can incorporate all of the features in the demo video. If there's not enough time, at least come out with some type of reporting wizard to work off of.

We'll see how Directions 2012 goes.

DenSter

Alex Chow wrote:

Daniel agreeing with me? What's this world coming to?!?!

I know right!!

Tarek_Demiati

I can't agree more with Alex, we under estimate the number of NAV Consultants which are not quite ready with RTC and Reporting Services,
at Directions 2012 in Rome, I met a NAV partner who needed to quote the upgrade an old and dusty 2 tiers installation into RTC.

The customization included about 100 Reports which most are still used on a regular basis.

After doing his home work the partner find out it was cheaper for the customer to re-create the reports in Excel using Jet Reports Essentials
rather than Reporting Services, obviously all the documents will still have to be done with Reporting Services ...

Some NAV partners are very productive with Reporting Services while others are still struggling with it.
I guess it's just a question of time before the majority will adopt the new technology.

Also Reporting Services is really geared at a consultant with a minimum of technical background and not your regular end user,
I guess that's why many people voted for the wizard functionnality in order to provide a higher level of abstraction for the mere mortal
who don't want to get his hand dirty with the most technical aspects of Reporting Services ...

clausl

Alex & Daniel, neither the Report Wizard nor the report Transformation was improved. The resources was used to improve the designer even more so we can create optimal reports in the Report Dataset Designers in NAV 2013 in the first place. When the Report Dataset Designer is first released with NAV 2013, it's very hard for the Reporting Team to make drastically changes as they did from CTP3 to CTP4. So it was decided to make changes on how Captions and Labels are created in the Report Dataset Designer, this was a unfortunately was a mess in CTP3. If the Report Team had not prioritized this over Report Transformation improvements and Report Wizard, we would have been stuck with mess for a long time.

So now we have the possibility to create Captions as parameters to the report. The benefit is that the dataset is not flooded with multiple Captions when you actually only need it once. Also performance test show that report performance is improved when Captions are used as parameters.
To get your captions as a parameter, you need to check mark "Include Caption" for your column in the Report Dataset Designer and then add the parameter as your caption in your report or add a label in the Label Designer, when captions is not bound to a field on the table.
Unfortunately this change came very late so not many standard reports are not using Captions as parameters. These captions are just added as columns in the Report Dataset Designer, this results in your dataset getting flooded with captions which you are not using. Cry!!! :-( But really easy to fix, if you need to optimize the standard report.

Also when you upgrade your reports from either Classic reports or RDLC reports(From NAV 2009) you will noticed that Captions are created under the dataitem which it used to belong to back in the old Section Designer. So "Include Caption" is not used when upgrading. You will need to manually change this. So when upgrading your reports you really want to clean out these Captions in your dataset and start using Captions as parameters.

Speaking of the Upgrade of Classic reports to NAV 2013 nothing much has changed to the Report Transformation (Create Layout Suggestion). It's pretty much the same, it use the same logic as in NAV 2009 and creates a report in RDLC 2005 format and then under the hood upgrades to RDLC 2008. Report team uses an API from Report Builder 3.0 to upgrade from RDLC 2005 to RDLC 2008 in case you wonder why Report Builder 3.0 is installed when you install NAV 2013.
I don't think we will see any improvements to the Report transformation, I would be surprised if we did. So I urge you get the UX guidelines under your skin when creating reports from scratch. This way you don't have to invent the wheel every time you create a new report. Report UX guidelines can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/201 ... lines.aspx. When I upgrade a classic report I take what I can from what the upgrade tool gives me and pretty much create the report from scratch. Simple list reports takes me around 30 min. to upgrade while document reports takes me around a day or 2 to upgrade depending of the complexity. So for document reports I try to use the standard reports as much as possible, so I only need to customize and not upgrade the document reports. This cuts down on the time spend on the upgrade.

Speaking of the Report Wizard, the Report Team is well aware that this is something we all like to have. But they need to solve some issues first.
- Should the Wizard create Reports based on the Report UX Guidelines? I think yes, since this will save us time fixing up report afterwards, today in NAV 2013 reports are not using the UX guidelines when upgraded.
- Should the Wizard create Reports based on the RDLC 2008? I think yes, since we don't need to have fields added to the body anymore, it should just add the fields directly to Headers and Footers and not add hidden fields on the Body of the report. In RDLC 2008 we can add fields directly into headers and footers. But to accomplish this the upgrade to will need to upgrade directly to RDLC 2008 and not first to RDLC 2005. This will not be a small task for them… and this will need to be done before the wizard is created. But then there is also the RDLC 2010 format which is coming with Visual Studio 2012. Should they use this instead of RDLC 2008, and if they do this, will we then ever have a report wizard for NAV 2013???
- Should the Wizard create Reports using “Include Caption” so captions are used as parameters? Of course!!!
- Should the Wizard be in NAV or Visual Studio? Big question? If NAV will support RDL reports(Server Side reports) in the future, we have the Report Wizard given to us for free in Report Builder 3.0. If the Report Wizard should be in NAV, should it then be based on the Report Dataset created, if yes the wizard could also help us upgrade classic report, because it would create RDLC layout based on the Dataset in NAV. And this really want we want, we want RDLC layout created for us so we don't start on a blank page in Visual Studio. But no matter how good a Report Wizard we get, we will need to learn how to create reports in Reporting Services, if you want to create reports in NAV 2013, neither an improved Report transformation or Report Wizard will help us with that.

/Claus Lundstrøm

davmac1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3ubLOKbx-Y
Thanks for the detailed post Claus - we want it all!
We are always running behind the latest and greatest, so I would like to see NAV2013 support VS2012.
And since Microsoft's cash pile is only exceeded by Apple, I would also like to see a truly magnificent report wizard that also includes document style reports.
If Captain Kirk had been using NAV, he would have said, "Computer - generate me a commercial invoice that includes Galactic VAT and local planetary sales taxes."
My users are always looking for "the what I want" button - don't think we have the technology for that yet, so I will settle or VS2012 and supported style sheets.

Alex_Chow

Thanks Claus for clearing that up.

But what I'm reading is that the reporting tool is only semi ready? So can we expect drastic improvements on reporting on every service pack or release?

jglathe

Hi,

Alex Chow wrote:

Thanks Claus for clearing that up.

But what I'm reading is that the reporting tool is only semi ready? So can we expect drastic improvements on reporting on every service pack or release?

a business opportunity for Pivotier, I'd say.

with best regards

Jens

clausl

From my point of view the Report Dataset Designer in NAV 2013 is very solid we just need a Report Wizard, so we can create reports even faster.

The real issue is the versions of RDL and RDLC which is pretty much a mess. Read my blog post here:http://mibuso.com/blogs/clausl/2012/08/08/rdl-vs-rdlc-versions-and-dynamics-nav/

Pivotier are using the RDL version and not RDLC version, so they have the luxery of the latest version and latest features, but on the hand you can also just create a server side report and feed it by a query in NAV 2013 and then you do not need Pivotier. I will blog about how to do a Server Side Report based in a Query in NAV 2013 when time permits.

/Claus Lundstrøm

Rob_Hansen

I'm confused as to why so much of the discussion here is focused on upgrading/transforming old reports. Of course there will be a lot of that work to do over the next few years, but for all "new" NAV sales/implementations, it's a non consideration. So, let's say we sell NAV 2013 in January 2013 and need to develop a bunch of custom reports for the customer. As it stands right now, it will all be manual work to list out the fields, create the report header (Company Name, USERID, date/time, etc.), and basic structure. No one is going to call up an old classic version of NAV and build the report there and then transform it. So, for new implementations (which should be the bulk of partners' work going forward if NAV 2013 does as well as Microsoft expects it to), there's a very strong need for a wizard to expedite this process. My thought is that the wizard should be within NAV as it was in the past - to "quick select" the fields you want, and have the wizard generate the list of fields and initial RDLC layout following NAV 2013 standards. Having the wizard on the RDLC side doesn't make a lot of sense to me...you'd still have to do the initial work within NAV to list out all the fields manually and create fields to store COMPANYNAME, USERID, etc. You'd have to do half the work I'd like to see eliminated, then the wizard would just help with the layout side (which wouldn't be NAV-specific, unless a NAV-specific wizard was created over there). I think that (1) this is definitely needed, and (2) it should be within the NAV development IDE.

Rob_Hansen

I also agree with Alex that I think a lot of partners and NAV resources need to embrace the RTC still. I was shocked when we took over a failed implementation just a few months ago from a partner that was planning to do everything in the classic client. They hadn't even told the customer that to move up to NAV 2013, all of the customizations to forms and reports would basically need to be redone. Very scary that partners are still doing that in mid 2012.

I think the demand for the transformation tools was as much a function of partners wanting to continue just doing what they already knew (develop in the classic client) and then having a way to flip it over to the RTC, as it was a function of needing it for upgrades. We've done a few RTC upgrades now, and haven't even used a form transformation tool. We just recreated custom forms as NAV 2009 pages from scratch. I think the page designer is actually quite efficient, so no need for a crutch there. We did use Create Layout Suggestion to get our starting point for reports, so that's more where I think there's still a need for something (wizard).