Preface
Reporting capabilities are the turn-key decision makers for choosing an ERP system. They cater from the low-level shop floor users to the board room members giving them the right insight into their business. That is one of the many reasons why report customizations dominate at customer implementations. Strengthening your reporting capabilities as a Developer not just makes you but also the users of your report confident than ever.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 is a phenomenal release that took AX to a different breadth and depth. The SSRS has brought in huge thrust to the leap forward. This book has been written to help you understand and acquire the skills necessary to be good at Reporting based on SSRS.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Understanding and Creating Simple SSRS Reports, walks you through creating a basic report that introduces you to several basic features of Dynamics AX reports.
Chapter 2, Enhancing Your Report – Visualization and Interaction, focuses on further controlling and improving your report through parameters, data regions, expressions, new report and style templates.
Chapter 3, A Report Programming Model, helps you in understanding the programmatic model of the reporting framework inside AX and introduces you to programmatically modifying report UI and validations.
Chapter 4, Report Programming Model – RDP, delves into creating advanced reports using the new report data contract framework. It also details how to design reports through Precision Design.
Chapter 5, Integrating External Datasources, showcases how reports can be extended beyond AX to include other data sources, such as Cubes, XML Cloud Service, or through the integrations framework.
Chapter 6, Beyond Tabular Reports, dives in to using the other types of report formats, such as chart and matrix reports. It further details the use of other interesting controls, such as gauges, lists, and rectangles with clearly drafted examples.
Chapter 7, Upgrading and Analyzing Reports, shows you the approach to adopt when moving reports from MorphX-based reports to SSRS and discusses several repeated customization patterns in reports.
Chapter 8, Troubleshooting and Other Advanced Recipes, is a collection of assorted topics that can be applied to your SSRS reports, such as deploying through your code, using Enum provider and localization of reports. This chapter also introduces you to the log viewer through which you can analyze and identify report usage, report logs, and more.
Appendix, Introduction to SSRS, will help you run through the basic architecture of AX SSRS, followed by a brief introduction to different reporting components and the comparative advantage over the legacy reporting system from the previous releases of Dynamics AX.
What you need for this book
To practice the content in this book, you need the following software:
- Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012
- SQL Server Reporting Services
- SQL Server Analysis Services
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
Alternatively, you can use the Virtual Image available for Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012/AX 2012 R2 through Microsoft Learning Download Center.
Who this book is for
This book aims at IT administrators looking to get their hands on to develop their own reports for their internal demands and for X++ developers who want to deepen their understanding of SSRS reports.
This book requires some basic knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, X++, and MorphX. Some examples are based on C# and .NET. However, they are not must to read this book.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Set the name as PKTReleasedProducts."
A block of code is set as follows:
public static void main(Args args)
{
PktRdlCustTransController srs;
srs = new PktRdlCustTransController ();
srs.parmReportName(ssrsReportStr(PktRdlCustTransList, CustTransList));
srs.parmArgs(args);
srs.startOperation();
}
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on Next and from the available fields drag-and-drop the required fields".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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