Document report design problems! Please help!!!

this is a big problem and actually messed up our companys budget when we had to learn how to handle the whole new report designing.

What i can recommend is taking a look at the reports MS designed in the Basic version of the NAV. But even these aren't flawless in many concerns.

Though I don't have the time to write a full tutorial in here, there are some basic tipps im glad to share:

1st of all: the new report is rendered by a standalone tool there is no data interchange between Report and Navision after the Navision-generated Recordset is sent to the ReportViewer. You can see this Recordset by looking at the page-Info of ther Reports' request form and then looking at the page-info of the rendered report in preview. (if you omit the first page-info it will tell you that you have to reopen the report again to get the recordset) This is all the data you can work with when you're designing the report. You can filter, sort, group, compare etc. it as you like. If you don't order it, it will be processed in the order you see in the recordset (which is usually sufficient)

- filtering for empty fields is very handy when you have multiple dataitems on the same level (you'll see what i mean when you analyse the recordset)
- grouping is one of the best ways to handle child dataitems. Depends on the recordset though.
- it's a good practise to Convert Fields of the recordset into Strings before comparing them (i.e. in filter settings): CStr(Fields!MyRecodsetField.Value) > ""
- Option Fields which influence the output (like the type of the Sales Line) are best passed to the Recordset as integer (i := salesline.type) if you use the text and your report has to support different languages you can waste a lot of time building huge "IF x OR Y" terms for each possible translation.
- If you don't need the classic layout to work (NAV 2009 only) keep it as simple as possible.
- setting reasonable DataSetFieldName-values (NAV 2009) might take some time but helps your sanity when adjusting reports you built a while ago
- The "visibility" property of objects can be your best friend i.e. for hiding lines based on their Type and your greatest enemy i.e. (where is that output gone? have i compared it correctly ?) especially because rather every object has this property.. you can hide whole Tables or single fields.

If anything else comes to my mind i'll edit the post.

I have just created a product which enable design of RDLC Reports from a RTC page, thereby enable all NAV Consultants to make modifications to the RDLC reports, without even opening Visual Studio.

If you are interested to see a demo of the product send me a PM, then we can setup a meeting. I will show you how to modify multiple reports in a few seconds, and also have the same report look completely different for different companies, but still being same Report object, with no modifications in RDLC. Also Invoice, Credit Memo, Order, Order Confirmation etc..., will all have the same look and feel

If you are not interested in this, I can also teach you how to make the document reports correctly. But this will not be a 10 min explanation, so I will need to charge for this training.

Send me a PM if you want to learn more.

/Claus Lundstrøm