What's the best way to connect Business Central to Power Pages? I've tried virtual tables so far, however, I am not able to see the data when I create a list view or a form in Power pages. It is returning the following error 'We're sorry, but something went wrong. Please try again, and if this persists, contact the website administrator.'.
Does anyone know how to solve this issue?
Should I keep using virtual tables or is there a better way?
Thanks in advance.
Not sure about Power Pages, I don't think there is a way to show a Power Page in BC other than embedding a web browser control into a BC page. But if the question is about reading Dataverse tables from BC, then virtual tables are the right way to do it.
First, you need to create a table object in BC using the AL Table Proxy Generator as described in the docs:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/administration-custom-cds-integration
Then you can create a page based on this table or read data from Dataverse in AL, just note that before querying a Dataverse proxy table, your code must register the connection. Call the method RegisterConnection from the codeunit CDS Integration Mgt. before running the page or executing any Find*/Get statement in AL.
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I am new to Google App maker and I don't have a lot of experience with coding either (sorry :/). Since App maker is marked as low-coding app builder tool, I assumed it was not that hard to make a very simple app with it. However, for me it is.
I need to make a simple app for demonstrations purposes only (so Cloud SQL and other complex database solutions are not in my interest here). I want to make it using calculated models (correct me if I am wrong, calculated models are just temporary solutions, since apps need to have like real databases to be fully functional?).
My app is basically made of 2 datas: 1) Employees and 2) Departments
-> Fields for "Employees" are: First name, Last name and Department.
-> Field for "Departments" is just Department name.
My app is supposed to look like this:
1st page: Table with current employees that has a button to add new employee,
2st page: Table with all department names (e.g. marketing, finance...) that has a button to add new department name,
3rd page: Form that opens when I click on add new employee button in which I can insert their first name, last name and from drop down menu choose department,
4th page: Form that opens when I click on add new department button in which I can insert new department name.
5th page: Form (or some other widget, not sure here) that has option to insert first and last name in order to find out what department that employee is assigned to.
I tried to make first 4 pages, but I end up with forms that I cannot insert anything into them. 5th page is still too much for me.
I hope you understand my struggles and if you know how to do it please share your knowledge. Thank you very much!
Calculated models are kind of like SQL views - they are not necessarily for temporary solutions. Every time you load a calculated model the script you write under that model's datasource is ran. That script usually loads data from an external source (I.e. grabbing stock prices from an API, loading data from an external SQL server, or generating random placeholder data).
You could use the cloud SQL models for this application that you are building - your table with all department names that is supposed to be displayed in the second page could just be a cloud SQL table with one single field for a department name.
I suggest you work through the example apps so you can get a better understanding of how the different components work. Here is a link to one for you to get started.
In short, you're going to create a few models to store information (I suggest using cloud SQL as the calculated models will require code whereas cloud SQL is more plug and play through app maker's bindings). Before you create any pages try to lay out how your databases will look as that will dictate how you set bindings or program your scripts.
Asking to completely make what is essentially a combination of the tutorials already provided by Google is pretty counter intuitive - you should ask more specific questions in regards to implementation.
As for App Maker being a low-code environment, that's only partially true. For very, very simple apps (think glorified forms) you will need only a couple lines of code and can probably do everything through drag-and-drop. However, anything more complicated than a simple form will almost certainly require a good chunk of actual code. There are plenty of resources online to learn Javascript.
You might want to try a google partner like AppSynergy for building stuff like this. It might be overkil for what you need (or maybe not if you intend to build a lot more stuff).
If this question is deemed inappropriate because it does not have a specific code question and is more "am I barking up the right tree," please advise me on a better venue.
If not, I'm a full stack .NET Web developer with no SSRS experience and my only knowledge comes from the last 3 sleepless nights. The app my team is working on requires end users to be able to create as many custom dashboards as they would like by creating instances of a dozen or so predefined widget types. Some widgets are as simple as a chart or table, and the user configures the widget to display a subset of possible fields selected from a larger set. We have a few widgets that are composites. The Web client is all angular and consumes a restful Web api.
There are two more requirements, that a reasonable facsimile of each widget can be downloaded as a PDF report upon request or at scheduled times. There are several solutions to this requirement, so I am not looking for alternate solutions. If SSRS would work, it would save us from having to build a scheduler and either find a way to leverage the existing angular templates or to create views based off of them, populate them and convert that to a pdf. What I am looking for is he'll in understanding how report generation best practices and how they interact witg .NET assemblies.
My specfic task is to investige if SSRS can create a report based on a composite widget and either download it as a PDF or schedule it as one, and if so create a POC based on a composite widget that contains 2 line graphs and a table. The PDF versions do not need to be displayed the same way as the UI where the graphs are on the same row and the table is below. I can show each graph on its' own as long as the display order is in reading order. ( left to right, then down to the next line)
An example case could be that the first graph shows the sales of x-boxes over the course of last year. The line graph next to it shows the number of new releases for the X-Box over the course of last year. The report in the table below shows the number of X-box accessories sold last year grouped by accessory type (controller, headset, etc,) and by month, ordered by the total sales amount per month.
The example above would take 3 queries. The queries are unique to that users specific instance of that widget on that specific dashboard. The user can group, choose sort columns and anything else that is applicable.
How these queries are created is not my task (at least not yet.) So there is an assumption that a magic query engine creates and stores these sql queries correctly in the database.
My target database is sql 2012 and its' reporting service. I'm disappointed it only supports the 2.0 clr.
OI have the rough outline of a plan, but given my lack of experience any help with this would be appreciated.
It appears I can use the Soap service for scheduling and management. That's straight forward.
The rest of my plan sounds pretty crazy. Any corrections, guidance and better suggestions would be welcome. Or maybe a different methodology. The report server is a big security hole, and if I can accomplish the requirements by only referencing the reporting names paces please point me in the right direction. If not, this is the process I have cobbled together after 3 days of research and a few msdn simple tutorials. Here goes:
To successfully create the report definition, I will need to reference every possible field in the entire superset available. It isn't clear yet if the superset for a table is the same as the superset for a graph , but for this POC I will assume they are. This way, I will only need a single stored procedure with an input parameter that identifies the correct query, which I will select and execute. The result set will be a small subset of the possible fields, but the stored procedure will return every field, with nulls for each row of the omitted fields so that the report knows about every field. Terrible. I will probably be returning 5 columns with data and 500 full of nulls. There has to be a better way. Thinking about the performance hit is making me queasy, but that was pretty easy. Now I have a deployable report. I have no idea how I would handle summaries. Would they be additional queries that I would just append to the result set? Maybe the magic query engine knows.
Now for some additional ugliness. I have to request the report url with a query string that identifies the correct query. I am guessing I can also set the scheduler up with the correct parameter. But man do I have issues. I could call the url using httpWebRequest for my download, but how exactly does the scheduler work? I would imagine it would create the report in a similar fashion, and I should be able to tell it in what format to render. But for the download I would be streaming html. How would I tell the report server to convert it to a pdf and then stream it as such? Can that be set in the reports definition before deploying it? It has no problem with the conversion when I play around on the report server. But at least I've found a way to secure the report server by accessing it through the Web api.
Then there is the issue of cleaning up the null columns. There are extension points, such as data processing extensions. I think these are almost analogous to a step in the Web page life cycle but not sure exactly or else they would be called events. I would need to find the right one so that I can remove the null data column or labels on a pie chart at null percent, if that doesn't break the report. And I need to do it while it is still rdl. And just maybe if I still haven't found a way, transform the rdl to a pdf and change the content type. It appears I can add .net assemblies at the extension points. But is any of this correct? I am thinking like a developer, not like a seasoned SSRS pro. I'm trying, but any help pushing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
I had tried revising that question a dozen times before asking, and it still seems unintelligible. Maybe my own answer will make my own question clear, and hopefully save someone else having to go through what I did, or at least be a quick dive into SSRS from a developer standpoint.
Creating a typical SSRS report involves (quick 40,000 foot overview)
1. Creating your data connection
2. Creating a SQL query or Queries which can be parameterized.
3. Datasets that the query result will fill
4. Mapping Dataset columns to Report Items; charts, tables, etc.
Then you build the report and deploy it to your report server, where the report can be requested by url with any SQL parameters Values added as a querystring:
http://reportserver/reportfolder/myreport?param1=data
How this works is that an RDL file (Report Definition Language) which is just an XML document with a specific schema is generated. The RDL has two elements that were relevant to me, and . As the names infer, the first contains the queries and the latter contains the graphs, charts, tables, etc. in the report and the mappings to the columns in the dataset.
When the report is requested, it goes through a processing pipeline on the report server. By implementing Interfaces in the reporting services namespace, one could create .NET assemblies that could transform the RDL at various stages in the pipeline.
Reporting Services also has two reporting API's. One for managing reports, and another for rendering. There is also the reportserver control which is a .NET Webforms control which is pretty rich in functionality and could be used to create and render reports without even needing a report server instance. The report files the control could generate were RDLC files, with the C standing for client.
Armed with all of this knowledge, I found several solution paths, but all of them were not optimal for my purposes and I have moved on to a solution that did not involve reporting services or RDL at all. But these may be of use to someone else.
I could transform the RDL file as it went through the pipeline. Not very performant, as this involved writing to the actual physical file, and then removing the modifications after rendering. I was also using SQL Server 2012, which only supported the 2.0/3.5 framework.
Then there were the services. Using either service, I could retrieve an RDL template as a byte array from my application. I wasn't limited by the CLR version here. With the management server, I could modify the RDL and deploy that to the Report Server. I would only need to modify the RDL once, but given the number of files I would need and having to manage them on the remote server, creating file structures by client/user/Dashboard/ReportWidget looked pretty ugly.
Alternatively, I instead of deploying the RDL templates, why not just store them in the database in byte array format. When I needed a specific instance, I could fetch the RDL template, add my queries and mappings to the template and then pass them to the execution service which would then render them. I could then save the resulting RDL in the database. It would be much easier for me to manage there. But now the report server would be useless, I would need my own services for management and to create subscriptions and to mail them I would need a queue service and an SMTP mailer, removing all the extras I would get from the report server, need to write a ton of custom code, and still be bound by RDL. So I would be creating RDLM, RDL mess.
It was the wrong tool for the job, but it was an interesting exercise, I learned more about Reporting Services from every angle, and was paid for most of that time. Maybe a blog post would be a better venue, but then I would need to go into much greater detail.
In my multi-user meteor application design I want to enable users to be able to create and store their own reactive dashboards to visualize data that they own within the applications database. For example, a user may have an object in the database representing the real-time disk usage of a processor. I want them to be able to submit/store html say to represent a dynamic dial as their dashboard. Another user may have their own weather station and want a dashboard with a last 24 hours thermometer and pressure trend. When they call up one of their stored dashboards it is rendered and would update as their data changes.
Can anyone point to example code or explain how to accomplish this? Or, authoritatively explain why it cannot be done in the framework. I have come across various dynamic API's but nothing that fits the bill. I.e. UI.renderWithData and Meteor._def_template.
The following topic was very similar to my questions and it got me a good start and I figured it out and posted and answer there.
How to make meteor evaluate user defined template text
is there a capability or function in BI server to manually run a transformation that would act on the results of the report?
like for example you would retrieve records that are tagged as 'NEW' using a pentaho report designer file deployed on the server. After being provided of results, I would like to act on those 'NEW' records and do some processing with them then tag them as 'OLD' using a transformation through a button.
is this possible? someone told me of xactions but i have the faintest idea about it.
Just wondering, why would you want the BI tool to perform the action. Why not do it in the database itself?
Vijay.
Rather than creating a set of instructions using xactions that would call some transformation and work on the user input, I just created the procedure in the database and called it from a prpt file. http://forums.pentaho.com/showthread.php?77311-Call-procedure-with-report-designer-3-6
I'm trying to profile SQL reporting services, used from ASP.NET application. In SQL profiler all the SQL run by ASP.NET shows up. It looks like the reporting SQL (from the RDL) doesn't show. Is there some setting or filter I'm missing?
Application name column = Reporting Services (or similar) usually.
You may need to trace SQL batch complete and RPC call complete
I've been bitten with this before...
When you get that big ball of mess, you can search it. I would search for an sp or sql statement that you know could only be used by SSRS. (If this doesn't exist, then force something in there just for testing purposes). Look at all the columns. There may be a column that jumps out at you as unique to reporting services that you could use as a filter.
So there's a few ways I profile that could help you.
Add the column named "HostName" and you'll get the server name appearing as the computer running the report.
Add a reporting login name to the database and use that name on the reporting service's Shared Data Source, and then filter by LoginName.
If you add a comment to the report, then you will see that comment and the sql of the report appear in the Data window.
For the third one, what I mean is do this:
-- Get Products Report
select productid, productname from products
And the comment line will appear in the window along with the SQL, which makes it very easy to track to a report when you're noticing one of them is causing issues, further on down the track.
Hope that helps.