How to make RDLC better (suggestions?)

mdPartnerNL

Not sure if RDLC it is better then Classic reporting but I really like the how it is working with the dataset and xml.

To improve performance I would suggest to spit up the xml (optional of course ) on a group field with new a page. This way we don't have to wait that long. The problem with xml has always been the waiting for the file to close.

And please Microsoft make it easier to upgrade a report?! Customers are paying a lot of money for the maintenance and don't want to pay extra for a report already created. If some partners can create a tool for this then why not MS?

My 2 cents... and hoping for other suggestions.

Alex_Chow

Good suggestions, but this is the wrong forum. The problem is not with Navision (Dynamics NAV). The problem is with the RDLC team in Microsoft.

The RDLC team and the NAV team don't really talk to each other.

mdPartnerNL

No, RDLC is not the problem. It's the released NAV objects.

We updated a customer from NAV5.0 to the latest NAV2013R2 hotfix 35800 Dutch NL version and you will not believe how much problems we had with the standard Sales Document reports ](*,)

Out of the box they don't work correct (empty page with header, fields over each other, padding wrong) or are designed wrong. For example Report 205 is still created in Letter Format while in NL we use A4 Format!!!.

You can't do any repeatable work in these reports. You would expect Report 206 Invoice and 207 credit note are almost equal in design...NOT. One developer created 206, another created 207. Almost all Names are different, so if you modified 206 for the customer you cannot copy anything to 207.. Aaargh..

These reports should be redone following there own guidelines in 2013R2.

tinoruijs

mdPartnerNL wrote:

No, RDLC is not the problem. It's the released NAV objects.
....
These reports should be redone following there own guidelines in 2013R2.

I think you're right.
I have been 'playing' some time now with report design in NAV2013 for an upgrade from 5.0 SP1.
And I think we as partners can solve almost every problem in a report. With help of Mibuso and other sites of course. :-)
Would be nice indeed if Microsoft did this for us. Customers and partners pay for that.

deV.ch

Since the document reports are absolutely unusable in the standard version the best you can do (imo) is to completly skip them and create your own ones. Thats what we did, we created a template for all sales & purchase reports that is easily maintainable and extendable. We tried to move as much logic & formating to code as possible to have the least rdlc work to do as possible. We tried to use HTML Formating & temp tables where it was possible and achieved very nice results with it. We were able to strip down the rdlc size (the height of all elements combined you see when you open the designer) from like four A4 pages it is in the standard version to a readable, understandable one A4 page with very few fields.