mibuso.com

OO yes lakshmi...
There are somany users who dont know this..

Dont think too much about the tool and follow this message

What I am doing is generally try to avoid building printable reports, Excel Buffer instead... usually it is more useful and more future-proof for the dreaded day when we will have no choice but upgrade to RTC and retrain everybody and redo printable reports and documents... I hope we can delay that 1-2 years though... I think even when NAV7 comes out, NAV6 wil be supported for 1-2 years... we have like 12 conditional footers in invoices and of course different ones in every company in the group etc. will not be easy when that day finally comes. AFAIK Excel Buffer reports can be upgraded to RTC without any change. This seems to be a fairly safe way forward. Too bad you are not allowed to generate invoices into Excel

I think you will have to make a decision: Use shortcuts, tricks and workarounds to artificially hold on to the past, or embrace the new technology and learn how to use that instead. Eventually, at some point, you will have no choice anyway, and if you just continue to hold on, by that time, everyone else will be better at that then you. Of course it will be painful at first, because you are learning. Just think back though to the time that you were not able to put 12 conditional footers in a NAV report. How long did it take you to figure THAT out? Same with the new technology, once you get the hang of it, you will get much better real fast.

It's better not to wait in my opinion.

There are always trade offs.
We get fantastic new capabilities and lose a few of the old. Have to find new ways to solve the old problems.

In pre-historic times I worked with Cobol apps. Their performance would blow away the current apps, but the lack of features and difficulties in extending the programs was a killer.
Plus - they became extremely painful to work on once I embraced and came up to speed on newer technology.

I forgot where I read this, but it appears that classic report will still be supported in version 7? Can anyone confirm?

Another option is to go the RDL route and use Pivotier (www.pivotier.com)... then you get to leverage SQL reporting and free yourself from the difficulties (and cost) with the NAV RDLC reporting. This is one of the best ISV products I've had the experience of working with. It is great for customers but maybe not for partners as it takes some of their revenue away from report writing and instead allows the customer to handle much of their reporting needs directly.

Excel buffer is DEADLY slow on RTC (about 7x-8x slower). To extract data in excel i just do the "create layout suggestion" trick: it generates a plain layout, i make the fields as narrow as possible to make them fit one pate, i remove the cangrow property from all the textbox, and....report done.
The user will run it in preview and see crap, of course. He has to export it to excel and outosize the columns, but this method is even faster than excel buffer on classic, and doesn't need programming

i thought they are officially "deprecated"...well, i think they will still compile, but how can you run them in an RTC only environment?

What they told us at Convergence is you can import a Classic report, but then you have to create the layout.
So yes to import and convert; no to run as Classic.

Denster,

It is not about learning, it is about

1) Actually I realized Excel reports are much more superior in many ways. Printable things, with the exception of documents, are outdated - we are not living in a paper age anymore. In fact I believe we should change our whole way of thinking - it shouldn't be reports but queries, datasets which can be processed further.

2) organizational inertia - if something works right, people will never understand why the vendor wants to break it and force you to redo it and introduce a possibility of errors. Everybody hates solving the same problem twice.

3) I don't care about others becoming better at it - do you? First of all demand for us still outstrips supply and probably will for a long time - there is little competition. Not in skill level, maybe in prices. Second, am in this for 10 years know and really want to get promoted out of physical coding / report design, hope I will achieve it soon. I think 10 years of hands-on work are enough. I think now in my thirties I should get into project management or something like that and leave hands-on work for people in their twenties. Especially report design, that should be left for the newest folks. I know you spent more than my 10 years in it, so what is your opinion about that? Do you still do hands-on work and do you intend to keep doing so?

Belias,

I am not talking about user-ran reports. To be fair I consider that "pull" methodology outdated and inefficient. I am talking about generating reports with NAS and Excel Buffer into files during the night and emailing them out. (Technically non-GUI Excel Automation is not supported but practically it works if I comment out the page layout code.)

This "push" attitude is a whole lot more preferable from an organizational point of view. For example if you automatically "push" the overdue invoices report to an accountant every night he has no excuses for forgetting to send reminders. If reports are ran by the users then they will just forget to use them.

What you say about its slowness worries me, but I think if it comes to it we can just replace the CreateSheet function with an appropriate .NET function. Can't be that hard.

You make good points. That's why I would've preferred NAV reporting to go to using SSRS instead of RDLC.

Most new prospects assumes that NAV uses SSRS for it's primary reporting tool. Almost no one I came across knows what RDLC is.

MattKeyes,

But if you are going to use SQL queries and thus lose the advantages of FlowFields (unless you use SIFT tables which is downright hideous), then there is no need for third-party-solutions. SQL is pretty much DIY, very easy.

- Excel PowerPivot. Download it, enjoy it, it is awesome.

- Simple "cubes" - a bunch of SUM and GROUP by on Entry Tables. A table of 200K entries becomes a view of 11K which even "normal" Excel Pivot can process easily and if you just copy it into another table every night then it is even faster.

- There are a million tutorials how to generate an Excel report from an SQL query through ADO

- sp_makewebtask can make a HTML table

I hate paper, but italians don't (i don't know austrians )...when i see people printing emails or printing reports on paper, i get angry and i tell them that it would be more comfortable to keep it on screen (copy/paste, paper loss etc...) but anyway...i still see the users printing every single document they post (even non-fiscal, not needed). In italy it's still paper-age, sadly...


ok...nas is classic client, excel buffer shouldn't be slow (never tried)

I'm with you with report pushing and "query reports"

Miklos,

How do you lose the advantage of FlowFields if you go to SQL? In the end, a FlowField is simply a SUM, COUNT, etc. query in the database, and there is no need to use the generated views.

Pivotier is a tool that allows ad-hoc SQL reporting via RDL straight out of NAV. An end user with no knowledge of SQL can build their own reports, and Pivotier does all the heavy lifting for them. A SSRS developer can develop a report in Visual Studio and load it back into NAV so that it can be run with NAV filters. Pivotier avoids having to use the clumsy RDLC implementation of NAV reporting and performs MUCH faster. There is also the added benefit of SQL optimization in a NAV database... Pivotier will automatically execute queries that implement all the functionality to prevent blocking, etc. To top it off, the footprint in NAV is extremely light.

Once data is in a SSRS report, then you can get it to Excel easily or into a variety of other formats. You also gain all the other benefits SSRS offers (hosting them on a company Intranet portal, automated batch routines, emailing, etc.). In my mind, Pivotier is the reporting engine that NAV 2009 should have had.

Excel is a powerful tool, but as a standalone reporting engine it is rather fragile. Coupled with that, the regular users shouldn't be required to open Excel to go get the information they are looking for... things should be a one-click straight out of NAV, and Pivotier offers this out of the box.

Maybe my two cents... although I wasn't asked... IMO, as long as you think you want to get into project management, you're not ready yet As for report design: Good, well thought out reports / applications / code / whatever are written by people who have learned something... from a teacher, and from lots of hands-on experience.

with best regards

Jens