mibuso.com

Hi all,

I want to know whether any recommended books is there for learning desigining rdlc reports in Visual Studio 2010.

If anyone knows the book name or link , kindly send me the details.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
chandru.

Try Googling.

For NAV, there's a book written as well:
http://www.dynamicsnavconsultant.com/20 ... ting-book/

Important to understand is that NAV only support RDLC(Local reports) version 2008 in NAV 2013. So when reading books about designing RDL(Server Side) reports all server features like the following are not available:
- Subscribing to reports
- Report Builder
- Saving to other formats, other than Word, Excel and PDF
- Accesing Reports from browser
- Refreshing a report
- Support for more than one dataset
- Support for SubReports
But importantly is that RDL(Server Side) is currently at version 2010, so features added from RDL2008 and RDL2010(SQL Server 2008 = RDL2008, SQL Server 2008 R2=RDL2010) are also not supported in RDLC 2008 reports. I.e this could be:
- Support for Sparklines
- Support for OverallPageNumber and OverallTotalPages(this could be really nice to have support for in NAV 2013, but we don't have this unfortunately)
- And at last saving to "docx" and "xlsx" is not possible from Report Viewer 2010, which is the Report Viewer supported in NAV 2013. So when NAV 2013 is released this fall we can now save to the well know "doc" format introduced in with Office 97 and retired with Office 2007. Report Viewer 2012 releaesed with Visual Studio 2012 at the same as NAV 2013 releases, prints fine to docx and xlsx formats but Visual Studio 2012 will not be supported for editing RDCL reports in NAV 2013.

I wish this was more simple, but unfortunately it is not, and I don't hope I confused you too much. Also the above mentioned books contains no info about how to design the report in the NAV Object Desiger, how to upgrade reports from NAV 2009 or before, how to use Captions as parameters, minimize the dataset sent over the wire, cleaining up the dataset in NAV Object Designer so other developers, than you, have a clue of the elements you have added to the dataset and at last make the Layout standout so it is easy to add new elements to the report and not just have <<Exp>> writen everywhere on report layout.

Maybe I should just write a book explaing all this.

/Claus Lundstrøm

I'd pre-order it right now

Get to it!

You really have to love the irony that for over a decade now the VB/C# crew have been complaining about how the Navision report designer was too complex and that Navision needs to get a simpler way to design reports "The Windows Way"... well they got what they asked for, and wow isn't report writing sooo much easier now than it was back in the old days.

So if I got it well:
NAV2013 uses RDLC2010, so we need SQL2008R2 (that supports RDLC2010) and to edit reports we need VS2010. Correct?

No, unfortunately NAV 2013 does not support RDLC 2010.
Everytime a new version of SQL Server is released a new version of RDL is released
Everytime a new version Visual Studio a new version of RDLC is released, but this is dependent on the latest version of RDL released.
Some time ago I created this slide which explains this:

Hopefully this will be simplyfied by Microsoft in the future.

Concerning which SQL Server to use with NAV 2013, you can use SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012.
And you will need Visual Studio 2010 Pro to edit reports or use the trick I outlined here to get a free editor for RDLC reports in NAV 2013:
http://mibuso.com/blogs/clausl/2012/05/31/free-visual-studio-designer-for-editing-reports-in-dynamics-nav-2013-and-other-options/

/Claus Lundstrøm