NAV 2013 and up - Visual Studio

floberger2001

Hi Guys,

How do you go along with RDLC reporting in NAV? I'm currently asked to get the best solution for developing NAV reports for our customers using Visual Studio / Report Builder having the lowest impact on our budgets.

My personal opinion is, that everyone who will have the need to customize NAV solutions, should have a valid Visual Studio installation in place.
It might be for reporting needs at the time being, but can be useful for some other things in the future. (Extend controls, develop web services,...)
I'm not so happy with report builder if you start a report from scratch. If you only have to make small changes to the layout, it might be ok. But this is only my personal opinion.

In your companies: What are developers using? Visual Studio or Report Builder?
What version of Visual Studio are they using, as you might need several versions for different NAV versions. VS 2008 - VS 2012 (2013)
What about Visual Studio Online? Does this version work? I don't expect it to do so, as I assume Visual Studio has to be installed locally. And even if you have an online abo, I assume you will only get access to the latest version to Visual Studio. And we know, this will not be usefull for older NAV versions.
Is every developer provided with one ore more Visual Studio version or only some of them?

To be honest. I come from AX and CRM world, always having a full Visual Studio MSDN around myself. So I never had to ask for it. I'm used to have 2 or more versions of Visual Studio on my development machine. But what should my colleges do?

Thanks for any input.
Florian

tinoruijs

I'm a NAV-specialist for quite some years and have to get used to the new development enviroments.
So for me now Report Builder is enough.
The other tools are probably better, but not for me at this time. :-)

floberger2001

Reading your reply, it's definitly not easy to see, if you have to deal with everything regarding document reports.
Meaning:
- Printing multiple invoices / delivery notes / .... with a selected number of copies and still having the right "page / pages" information on the invoice.
- Having subtotals between the pages or better said running totals.
- Using additional information on item texts/descriptions if needed and Keep the spaces if not.
- Printing tax information depending business cases.
-

Is report builder really aware of all this things?

In the meantime I saw that MS is pushing Word layout creation for NAV 2015 customers.
Sounds good for marketing departments. I fear it's not so handsome for the consulting and developers departments. ;-)

Regards,
Flo

tinoruijs

floberger2001 wrote:

Reading your reply, it's definitly not easy to see, if you have to deal with everything regarding document reports.
Meaning:
- Printing multiple invoices / delivery notes / .... with a selected number of copies and still having the right "page / pages" information on the invoice.
- Having subtotals between the pages or better said running totals.
- Using additional information on item texts/descriptions if needed and Keep the spaces if not.
- Printing tax information depending business cases.
-

Is report builder really aware of all this things?

I try to avoid customers who have those needs..
No, just kidding. I've had some request that cost me a lot of time Report Builder, but in the end I could do everything I needed to do.

floberger2001 wrote:

In the meantime I saw that MS is pushing Word layout creation for NAV 2015 customers.
Sounds good for marketing departments. I fear it's not so handsome for the consulting and developers departments. ;-)

I think Word Layout is only for some minor look and feel stuff. And indeed the possibility of the sales department to say customers can develop/modify their own report in Excel. But I'm glad it's possible.

TonyDuarte

From what I've been doing between VS and RB I find the following a slow time in development:
RB lacks:

-> Compiler so that we can sort errors without having to go to NAV and compile the report.
-> Object search. When you get an error like: Textbox100 it won't be easy to find.

At least that's what I miss from developing in VS and now in RB.

If you ask, is there something that can't be done? No, the only problem will be time I guess.