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NAV 2013 - An Open Letter to the NAV Dev. Team

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  • einsTeIn.NETeinsTeIn.NET Member Posts: 1,050
    jglathe wrote:
    At least the users I know, they want to get their work done. Funny thing, that. It's a little like switching from Office2003 to something with a higher version number. It might look nicer, but you're slower (and yes, you stay slower than before) because your menus and old hotkeys are gone, instead you have the ribbon, and you have to do the icon-hunting thing ALL THE TIME. The new users seem to get along easier with the new interface, but you can use a mouse only so fast. They won't get up to the CC speeds no matter what. What they have to do is no simple task, not only mass data entry, they need to make decisions, and they have to do it in a reasonable amount of time. What they never do is looking at some type of diagram, you know pie chart, bar chart or suchlike. They know their numbers.
    OldNAVDog only says that you can't even properly code for the RTC to properly use the new interface, and he is right about it.
    Learning the new office versions was just a matter of training and time. Of course, there are still some old fashion guys that still have some issues with it but that's nothing that could prevent a bigger company from moving forward to new technology. I mean you can't hold on just because some of your employees are not able or don't want to follow. I think it's somewhat different in very small companies as it might be the only employee in his area. But even there you can't remain for ages in this stage.

    But I know what you mean. Some people are more or less data and figure based and some are rather visual chart based. I think best would be if NAV would let the users choose which way they want to enter and see their data. I mean in CC it was just one way and in RTC it's more or less the other way. Why not offer both and let the users decide their preferred way?
    "Money is likewise the greatest chance and the greatest scourge of mankind."
  • einsTeIn.NETeinsTeIn.NET Member Posts: 1,050
    jglathe wrote:
    Alex Chow wrote:
    I'm positive that somewhere, new young hotshot developer that will make the NAV world a better place is just waiting for your guidance.
    I'm not. The education chain is broken on this one, I'm afraid.
    I'm not sure about this. I see what you mean, maybe in furture we'll have a completely different type of NAV developer. But my gut feeling tells me that if you want to sell business software even your developers need to understand business workflows. So, maybe at the moment it looks like Visual Studio developers are far away from what is needed in NAV but one day or the other there will be some clever pure .NET guys who get the idea of business software (maybe there are already but to few to notice them).
    "Money is likewise the greatest chance and the greatest scourge of mankind."
  • vasjavasja Member Posts: 19
    jglathe wrote:
    Hi Alex,

    sorry, can't resist... :wink:

    At least the users I know, they want to get their work done. Funny thing, that. It's a little like switching from Office2003 to something with a higher version number. It might look nicer, but you're slower (and yes, you stay slower than before) because your menus and old hotkeys are gone, instead you have the ribbon, and you have to do the icon-hunting thing ALL THE TIME. The new users seem to get along easier with the new interface, but you can use a mouse only so fast. They won't get up to the CC speeds no matter what. What they have to do is no simple task, not only mass data entry, they need to make decisions, and they have to do it in a reasonable amount of time. What they never do is looking at some type of diagram, you know pie chart, bar chart or suchlike. They know their numbers.
    OldNAVDog only says that you can't even properly code for the RTC to properly use the new interface, and he is right about it.

    Sorry, can't laugh about this one anymore. Done the suggesting thing since 2008, been at Microsoft Germany HQ at one occasion, they don't even pretend to listen. But most of the (higher-up) people responsible for NAV have been replaced several times since then. Not a good sign.

    Be careful what you wish for. :mrgreen:

    I'm not. The education chain is broken on this one, I'm afraid.

    with best regards

    Jens

    Hi Jens,

    I could not agree more with You. Since I recently took a look at Nav2013 - RTC and development enviroment for the first time (we all have Classic client here), I was simply horrified with what I saw!

    For starters, shortcuts. Since I went long way from windows programming I know for a fact that putting an option like "swith to old shortcuts" is around 4h of coding for a single programmer, and I cannot understand why they decided that they know better then their users, how software should work. I just imagine everyday user who works very fast using keyboard only (and all normal users, go to that stage sooner or later), how they will be surprised when we tell them - forget the keyboard, use your mouse next couple of months. Then learn new shortcuts. Simple! Thousands of users adapt for new shortcuts for months on one side, and 4h of coding on the other side. That is how much MS listens to their users.

    Entering dates in reports! How consistent! In old client if you enter say 01, interface translates this immediately to say 01.09.2013. New interface do not translates anything in report request fileds. So if you put P9 in the date fields you do not know what it translates to until you start the report. It works, but it does not show until you start report.

    New Query objects are nice, but unions are not supported as well as many other kind of SQL queries. I hoped we'll get to SQL here, but that is not to happen. What is worse we cant use them in pages or reports. So what is their point?

    3tier architecture is fine with me, but then I expected that we could sort lists on any column we like, including flow field columns.

    Filtering in new interface is really much slower then in classic. In old client all users used to go like this: Position on column, F7, Enter, Position on other column, F7, Enter. In RTC this procedure is much more complicated. Flow filter is hidden very well in a system button?!?

    Ribbon. Dont get me started. There is no consistency there. Some forms do have navigation buttons (previos, next), some dont. Some have them on home ribon, some on action ribbon. Where are the "First record" and "Last record" buttons at all? Old interface took very small piece of screen for essential functions that were easy to use: New, Delete, Search, Filter buttons, Navigation Buttons, Export buttons. New interface dispersed all those functions throughout the interface on a much larger piece of a screen. The easiest and most usefull thing in old Client is redesigned for the worst. I would really like to put the Designer of RTC interface to post everyday hundreds of documents to get the sence of time waisting this new interface really is!

    Navigation through the card type pages. We cant use arrows any more (worse, we can on flowfields, but once you drop into text box you can get out only with tab). Instead TAB and SHIFT-TAB are only options. Why? No reason. If I want to filter card view I cant, If I want to see the filter applied to card view I cant, but I can clear it?!?! If I want to copy contents of a flow field on a card page I cant. What used to be CtrlF8 to see details of a record is now on System Button - Help - About this page?!?!? By the way declared shortcut for this Ctrl-Alt-F1 does not work.

    I could add dozen more like this, but I will finish my rant with things that I am very positive about - new dimensions engine is really great, web services are nice functional addition to the system.

    My advice to the designers of Nav client in the future. Use it for real for a month then decide "what is best for our customers that they already do not know".
  • jglathejglathe Member Posts: 639
    vasja wrote:
    My advice to the designers of Nav client in the future. Use it for real for a month then decide "what is best for our customers that they already do not know".

    That's good advice. I would put in some C/AL designers as well :mrgreen: It's how new UIs should be tested anyway, IMO. All the UX stuff would magically disappear as "crap" and sense would break through. At least with someone who takes the task of achieving consistency and usability to the heart.

    with best regards

    Jens
  • deV.chdeV.ch Member Posts: 543
    Ctrl+Alt+F1 works, you just need to press the "Windows" key with all the other keys... (Yes you may break your fingers but it works!)
    BTW its a hardware (HP / Dell) problem.
    My Blog
  • Miklos_HollenderMiklos_Hollender Member Posts: 1,598
    Jens,

    How is it possible they use Navision 354 with todays Windows? Isn't it so that sooner or later people are forced to upgrade because the old software is not compatible with the new operating system?
  • jglathejglathe Member Posts: 639
    Hi Miklos
    Miklos Hollender wrote:
    Jens,

    How is it possible they use Navision 354 with todays Windows? Isn't it so that sooner or later people are forced to upgrade because the old software is not compatible with the new operating system?

    Virtual Machines are not all bad 8) Actually, they use it on Windows XP. And in the XP Mode of Windows 7. Works good enough for them. They profit greatly from the development in hardware and I/O speed of the last years, so their system is even way faster than before.

    with best regards

    Jens
  • vasjavasja Member Posts: 19
    Well after two month, I had to add more staff to my rant above:

    1. In old UI whatever the field you are on, there is full field name and full value shown in the lower left of the screen. Very, usefull little thins, not present in RTC

    2. Ability to make table header as high as you like is much better then choosing 1, 2 or 3 rows high header

    3. Likewise, in old UI you could rearange columns directly on the table. In RTC you have to go to separate dialog and click Move Up, and Move Down about 50 times to achieve same thing. Very modern and high tech indeed. Have RTC designers EVER LOOKED at classic client?

    4. Old master detail forms were very consistent with tabs at the top and rows at the bottom. Now first tab is at the top, then comes rows and rest of the tabs is at the bottom. This is HORROR. Plain and simple this is very BAD UI DESIGN. And believe me Ive seen them all for 25 years. Putting scroll bars at the MIDDLE of the screen is bad design. Period. I am sorry I cant put images here, but there are so meny instances when there are couple of scroll bars at the middle of the screen, then one vertical bar just to the left, and one more at the screen edge. Forms often have TWO OR THREE VERTICAL and even horizontal scroll bars. I suppose designers of this never used monitors smaller then 32"

    5. General Posting Setup. This one is real beauty. You found the right place to put the account in the matrix - in the old ui press F8 and get the account from above. In new ui, you click edit where you get the card for the row you were in, then you try to find the right account in the groups, and then remember what was your name and were you doing at all. So usefull its simpler to run the table from designer directly.

    6. Worst is loss of control on how pages look. We used to have forms which ran beautifully on barcode handheld devices. Every single pixel on those forms is used maximaly. Now you cannot control anything in the form - not even the tab order or what field has the focus! I read somewhere that "Pages are about what is displayed, not how it is displayed". How can I begin to comment this? I heard that RowSpan and ColSpan are added in R2 version to better control placement! This is adding insult to injury. If pages are about what, not about how, then why boder? MS, PLEASE RETURN BACK TO DEVELOPERS CONTROL OF HOW PAGE WILL LOOK!

    7. Generaly in old client you could say where you are and what you are doing with single glance on the monitor. In RTC I often do not know in what field I am and do I have a focus or not, or can I edit something or not. Extremely counterintuitive.

    8. Ribbon cannot be controled from the code. I you want to show or hide system buttons you have to do it from the users session.

    9. With the old buttons, when I wanted to find, say "Item Cross References", I would click on Item button and read the list to find it. With ribbons, you have to drift above every single little button, and wait for a tooltop to see what it is for.

    All of the above has nothing to do with new technology. All of them are doable in RTC, and they are not in RTC because of decision not to do so, because it will go against some guidelines - I suppose all who uses PC with a monitor has to swallow it and use it like their kids are using their tablets and phones.

    I dare all of RTC apologetics to point me to ONE THING which is better - more productive for the user - then in classic client.
  • davmac1davmac1 Member Posts: 1,283
    save any report to Excel, PDF, or Word is a nice feature.
    There are definitely trade-offs, but there are some useful additions.
    If they can figure out how to get better screen control with the new page styles, it would be nice - but they are trying to make one set of page definitions work with 3 clients. Right now you can use grid controls and the page will be fine on one client and terrible on a different client.

    They may have to have advanced options that only work for Windows client or for browser client.
    David Machanick
    http://mibuso.com/blogs/davidmachanick/
  • tinoruijstinoruijs Member Posts: 1,226
    vasja wrote:
    I dare all of RTC apologetics to point me to ONE THING which is better - more productive for the user - then in classic client.

    In NAV 2013 R2 you can sort on every column. :D
    Tino Ruijs
    Microsoft Dynamics NAV specialist
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    vasja wrote:
    Well after two month, I had to add more staff to my rant above:

    1. In old UI whatever the field you are on, there is full field name and full value shown in the lower left of the screen. Very, usefull little thins, not present in RTC

    2. Ability to make table header as high as you like is much better then choosing 1, 2 or 3 rows high header

    3. Likewise, in old UI you could rearange columns directly on the table. In RTC you have to go to separate dialog and click Move Up, and Move Down about 50 times to achieve same thing. Very modern and high tech indeed. Have RTC designers EVER LOOKED at classic client?

    4. Old master detail forms were very consistent with tabs at the top and rows at the bottom. Now first tab is at the top, then comes rows and rest of the tabs is at the bottom. This is HORROR. Plain and simple this is very BAD UI DESIGN. And believe me Ive seen them all for 25 years. Putting scroll bars at the MIDDLE of the screen is bad design. Period. I am sorry I cant put images here, but there are so meny instances when there are couple of scroll bars at the middle of the screen, then one vertical bar just to the left, and one more at the screen edge. Forms often have TWO OR THREE VERTICAL and even horizontal scroll bars. I suppose designers of this never used monitors smaller then 32"

    5. General Posting Setup. This one is real beauty. You found the right place to put the account in the matrix - in the old ui press F8 and get the account from above. In new ui, you click edit where you get the card for the row you were in, then you try to find the right account in the groups, and then remember what was your name and were you doing at all. So usefull its simpler to run the table from designer directly.

    6. Worst is loss of control on how pages look. We used to have forms which ran beautifully on barcode handheld devices. Every single pixel on those forms is used maximaly. Now you cannot control anything in the form - not even the tab order or what field has the focus! I read somewhere that "Pages are about what is displayed, not how it is displayed". How can I begin to comment this? I heard that RowSpan and ColSpan are added in R2 version to better control placement! This is adding insult to injury. If pages are about what, not about how, then why boder? MS, PLEASE RETURN BACK TO DEVELOPERS CONTROL OF HOW PAGE WILL LOOK!

    7. Generaly in old client you could say where you are and what you are doing with single glance on the monitor. In RTC I often do not know in what field I am and do I have a focus or not, or can I edit something or not. Extremely counterintuitive.

    8. Ribbon cannot be controled from the code. I you want to show or hide system buttons you have to do it from the users session.

    9. With the old buttons, when I wanted to find, say "Item Cross References", I would click on Item button and read the list to find it. With ribbons, you have to drift above every single little button, and wait for a tooltop to see what it is for.

    All of the above has nothing to do with new technology. All of them are doable in RTC, and they are not in RTC because of decision not to do so, because it will go against some guidelines - I suppose all who uses PC with a monitor has to swallow it and use it like their kids are using their tablets and phones.

    I dare all of RTC apologetics to point me to ONE THING which is better - more productive for the user - then in classic client.

    There are a lot of things better in the RTC, but to be honest, you are correct on all 9 issues you mention. It is good input for the people working on the UI. Especially issue 9 is really anoying. I also dislike the yes/no dialog in which you cannot see if yes or no is highlighted with Windows 8.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • vasjavasja Member Posts: 19
    tinoruijs wrote:
    vasja wrote:
    I dare all of RTC apologetics to point me to ONE THING which is better - more productive for the user - then in classic client.

    In NAV 2013 R2 you can sort on every column. :D

    Well You found one allright. Internal Dimension engine is also a real beauty (but its not a part of UI)....

    BTW, can someone point mo to find/REPLACE in RTC, please? I do hope that I will not have to respond with SQL UPDATE query, when user asks me to REPLACE empty posting group in his journal...
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    Find and replace is not possible.

    It has been discussed and not (yet) implemented.

    The functionality was not 100% stable in classic either, but sometimes it worked.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • jglathejglathe Member Posts: 639
    Hi,
    Mark Brummel wrote:
    It has been discussed and not (yet) implemented.
    The functionality was not 100% stable in classic either, but sometimes it worked.

    ...wow. Just. Wow. This is "The best release ever" ? Unbelievable... Regarding Classic: I've been using this function since 2000, and had no stability problem with it. Not really deterministic results, yes. But no stability problems.

    with best regards

    Jens
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    Lets agree that from a UI perspective there are a ton of loose ends. I agree with everyone that they need to be addressed.

    The RTC has been made a long time ago now by very smart people. Some features were outscoped, some were dropped on purpose.

    I'll send this list to one of the lead UI people and see what they have to say about it. They are very nice people which are proud of their work.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • Miklos_HollenderMiklos_Hollender Member Posts: 1,598
    vasja wrote:

    I dare all of RTC apologetics to point me to ONE THING which is better - more productive for the user - then in classic client.

    Saving filters. I slowly and painfully trained most power users to not request report development from me whenever they need some one-off information, but rather go to a form like Item Ledger Entries, or Posted Sales Shipment Lines, set filters, copy to Excel and sum or pivot.

    Saved filters is a huge step forward, this is the closest thing I ever saw to end-users actually defining reports themselves.

    I could live with the RTC. What I cannot live with is the reporting. To be more precise, what I cannot live with is the ginormous effort necessary to invest into re-developing documents that work and look perfectly today. Really. Build a perfect Sections to RDLC layout converter and I will accept every other hindrance.
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    I am doing an upgrade from 5.0 to 2013R2 as we speak. We use a complete mixture of technologies and vendors.

    We outsourced the report conversion. So far so good and cheap.

    Dit you see the report conversion battle between Clausl, Yaveon and 1Click?

    Basically we choose the Clausl strategy to build the reports like they should for a fair price.

    I'll see if I can keep you informed wheter or not I am still happy in a few weeks.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • vasjavasja Member Posts: 19
    We have same experience with reports, it takes 10 times more time to make them, and we had to outsource almost all of them to our partner which we did not do for years.

    Well I have one more thing that was anoying - when I make column filter with Alt-F3 it does not show in the filter list. When I add another column filter and want to remove previous, I have to clear all filters and then go from start. Is this a bug or a feature?
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    I would like to call BS on the fact that it takes 10 times longer to make a report.

    Please watch the movies of the recent report battle. I strongly believe in making them like Claus does with experience. The reason we outsource them are low wages (sorry) and simply the amount of work for which we do not have the resources.

    1Click has a great report conversion tool but it still needs polishing and does not quite use the best practices you need for a great report.

    We do use their dataport-xmlport tool. Highly recommended.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    vasja wrote:
    Well I have one more thing that was anoying - when I make column filter with Alt-F3 it does not show in the filter list. When I add another column filter and want to remove previous, I have to clear all filters and then go from start. Is this a bug or a feature?

    Agree, needs to be addressed. The other (normal) filters are not intuitive and easy to use. Users complain about this.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • jglathejglathe Member Posts: 639
    Hi Mark,
    Mark Brummel wrote:
    I would like to call BS on the fact that it takes 10 times longer to make a report.

    so you're saying we're too dumb to see the greatness of the RDLC design? I'm sorry, but this really annoys me. New doesn't always mean better. Solving the problem with outsourcing it to a low wage country is only a short-term remedy. In the long run you'll loose the ability to do reports.

    with best regards

    Jens
  • Marije_BrummelMarije_Brummel Member, Moderators Design Patterns Posts: 4,262
    Jens,

    No, I do not mean that at all.

    Let's reverse the statement "new does not always mean better." and lets assume the old report designer was better.

    Based on that assumption, lets analyse improvements in RDLC and discuss how that could have been implemented into our old report designer.

    Rumour goes that the old report designer was developed over night as a last minute job when the windows version was released. Let's asume that is true.

    The old report designer did not improve in close to 20 years. Nothing. Before RDLC came people Always complained about the report designer and asked for things like colors, graphs, watermarks, PDF, etc.

    If it were possible, these improvements would have been made to the old report designer a decade ago.

    I'm not saying RDLC is better but it has these improvements.

    A couple of things went wrong and/or are still wrong. Orriginally RDLC was not designed for Document reports and it still has problems with them. Based on RDLC 2005 Microsoft shipped reports with NAV2009 that had terrible workarounds and still looked ugly as hell. Not using any visual improvements but making life difficult with SetData, GetData, Grouping etc.

    Since then we now have RDLC2012 and a lot of improved reports. When I now send a customer report to my accountant I no longer have to be ashamed of the way it looks. There are also improvements to the way VS works and there are a ton of best practices that make it possible to make reports as quick as in the old days with the new tools and the great looks.

    GetData and SetData are now only nessesairy when you want to change the language during a batch print of invoices for what I understand.

    RDLC and VS are improving, slowly, too slow, but they improve. NAV old report designer stood still since 1995.

    As for outsourcing, this in my opinion is a great short term solution for the next decade of upgrading customers, after that it will die.

    Hopefully this clarifies my thinking about RDLC.

    Could it been done differently? Maybe. Maybe NAV should have improved the old report designer but the fact that they did not do that in 20 years lead me to believe the design was crap and noone wants to touch it.

    What if the NAV people would have made a new report designer themselves? Well maybe it would have looked like RDLC? It would have been a very expensive project and have led to us (NAV community) having a new designer that no-one else has.

    Now we have something that is also used by others and is growing by itsself using budgetting outside NAV. This is offcourse a political thing where NAV teams are requesting RDLC teams for improvements and risks of being ignored.

    Let's aim our complains at the VS and RDLC people and help the NAV Report team getting some improvements to that designer rather than complaining why we have RDLC in the first place. We cannot change history.
    Marije Brummel | Freelance Business Central Specialist
  • jglathejglathe Member Posts: 639
    Hi Mark,

    thank you for your answer. I'm not sure if what I meant came across, though :mrgreen: What got to me was calling BS on our experience with the tools. Well, the 10x more time IS the experience that we have. In my case (including "feel-chill") it's even worse. Fortunately (or so) I don't have to work with RDLC on a daily basis (we're on 5.0/2009R2 with web services around here, and 90% of my other business is older versions of NAV). This won't last. It's one thing of having to use what's available and making it work somehow (even with outsorcing... 10 years is "long-term", btw), and another one finding a way for the future. Since selling NAV with RTC and RDLC is economically hazardous, I don't think this will be my way forward.

    with best regards

    Jens
  • tinoruijstinoruijs Member Posts: 1,226
    Mark Brummel wrote:
    The old report designer did not improve in close to 20 years. Nothing. Before RDLC came people Always complained about the report designer and asked for things like colors, graphs, watermarks, PDF, etc.
    If it were possible, these improvements would have been made to the old report designer a decade ago.

    That's right!
    The old report designer has always got a lot of complaints from everybody. But people got used to it and knew nothing would change. So they put up with it.
    I'm doing an upgrade to NAV 2013 R2 right now and have to put in a lot of extra time to learn VS and RDLC. Was about time for me. ;-)
    Tino Ruijs
    Microsoft Dynamics NAV specialist
  • asmilie2basmilie2b Member Posts: 122
    Just to put my two cents in as a user.
    I am sure for the partners out there upgrading must be a nightmare as far as reports are concerned. It was a challenge when we upgraded to 2013, but we knew it would be a lot of work to do the reports so started on them early, and left a lot behind. Now we are on 2013 the capabilities in the new reporting are great, they look a lot cleaner and the colour and graphing, links, interactivity for sorting and other extra bells are solving some old problems we had. It takes more time to make them, but we create them all in house and it hasn't been that hard, always just finding the closest existing standard report to copy from and starting from there. (Or we just use powerpivot and Odata, or an excel export with the excel buffer table).
    Bruce Anderson
  • Alex_ChowAlex_Chow Member Posts: 5,063
    So... Has anyone figured out how to run the standard Inventory Valuation report in a 80 GB database with 7 years of history yet?

    RDLC is cool and looks pretty. But it has to work. RDLC is not meant to process large amounts of data and that's a fact.
    Confessions of a Dynamics NAV Consultant = my blog
    AP Commerce, Inc. = where I work

    Getting Started with Dynamics NAV 2013 Application Development = my book
    Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV - 3rd Edition = my 2nd book
  • genericgeneric Member Posts: 511
    Upgrade to AX
  • Miklos_HollenderMiklos_Hollender Member Posts: 1,598
    @asmilie2b

    As a developer working on the end user side: why would you use "normal" reports for anything but documents? For everything else Excel Buffer exports are a lot better IMHO.

    Not only in functionality, also in "culture". I mean what is the usual NAV development process at a end user side? Users say hey we kept these and these data in Excel so far, we want them in NAV. And we want a report. What is the ideal report that raises the fewest eyebrows? Why, the very same Excel file generated from NAV of course! So nobody needs to get used to something new.

    And when with a bit customization they don't even need to run it because it gets emailed to the manager who don't use NAV every day or week, they feel this is real progress, because then you fully automated X hours a week of a given employee who kept maintaining the Excel file and emailing out, yet the results for everybody else are exactly the same.

    This is the ideal way to improve a system, to automatize a certain user task while keeping the results the same for everybody else, isn't it?

    Since 2011, since I am on the end user side, I never created a new "printable" report, only Excel Buffer exports.

    So my only beef - but a big one - of RDLC is report conversions. I hate, hate, HATE to have to tell my boss I will work X hours on it and the result will be the same as before! Because we really don't need colors (preprinted letterheads are cheaper) in the invoice or order confirmation, or drilldown or vertical text or graphs... and we have different reports "for historical reasons" for every company in the group... (i.e. different subsidiaries used different NAV partners before I joined).
  • Miklos_HollenderMiklos_Hollender Member Posts: 1,598
    @Alex

    By making an Excel Buffer export or a text file export? Why use RDLC for this?
  • rmv_RUrmv_RU Member Posts: 119
    Alex Chow wrote:
    So... Has anyone figured out how to run the standard Inventory Valuation report in a 80 GB database with 7 years of history yet?
    RDLC is cool and looks pretty. But it has to work. RDLC is not meant to process large amounts of data and that's a fact.
    That's why i prefer to use SQL procedures and ado recordsets.
    It takes few minutes to calculate the valuation and few seconds to send the recordset into a Excel even it contains 100 000 records.
    Looking for part-time work.
    Nav, T-SQL.
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