Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: Professional Reporting

Book Image

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: Professional Reporting

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is widely used in enterprises with its enhanced reporting features, but there still isn’t a book that covers reporting in depth, until now. This book will show you what’s possible and exactly how to develop reports for Dynamics NAV 2009. Learn why reports are designed in a specific way and then apply this knowledge to your advantage. Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: Professional Reporting is an essential guide to understanding the effort involved in creating reports in Dynamics NAV 2009, and all of the available reporting possibilities. Reading this book will result in a better understanding and it will help you save time during development.The book starts with an overview of what kind of reports you can create without a developer using charts, dimensions, and analysis views. The next chapter will introduce the new architecture of Role Tailored Client (RTC) reports and the basics on how to create them or have them generated. Moving on we will discuss data visualization, where you will learn how and when to implement all the available Visual Studio controls. Document reports and other types of specific reports are covered next, and you will get to know all the best workarounds for getting them to work correctly.Knowing other related features is vitally important to obtain a helicopter view of all the reporting possibilities of Dynamics NAV, and the next chapter will introduce Business Intelligence concepts and available technologies that could be used in combination with the Dynamics NAV database. Technology is evolving rapidly and new versions of Dynamics NAV are in the pipeline, so the book will also provide you with a view to the future and how to prepare for it.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009: Professional Reporting
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

TOP X reports


A specific type of report you are sometimes asked to produce is the TOP X report. For example, a report containing sales revenue by salesperson where the data is not just a list of numbers sorted alphabetically but by sales revenue from highest to lowest, to see who is really performing in a certain period.

To be able to achieve this goal, you will need to sort and filter the data in your report.

Sorting is organizing report data in a certain order and filtering is about eliminating unwanted information within a report. The sort order you define in the Visual Studio Report Designer will take precedence over the order in which the dataset is generated/sorted.

Tip

Sorting and performance

Sometimes, students believe that because the sorting in Visual Studio overrides the sorting of the data items, that the data item should not be sorted at all because that would consume unnecessary resources. In fact, this is not true. It might very well be that you select a key for a data item ...