MorphX report designer in Ax 2009 seems to be not the 'best' as report designer.. I don't know if is my fault, or if morphx report designer too buggy to do his job.
I'm guessing if there are some alternative to do report for Ax 2009: maybe Crystal Report and Visual Studio ? Or ... ?
Thanks
SSRS is the main alternative for AX 2009. You can deploy the reporting extensions and analysis cubes for some good reporting data. Analysis cubes will need to be configured to match your individual license file.
If you just want to be able to create SSRS reports, I believe you can just go to (Admin>Setup>Business analysis>Reporting Services>Reporting Servers" and point to your SSRS instance, and create the "Dynamics AX" data source.
You might need to do Kerberos setup too depending on your environment topology.
The best alternative options is by far Reporting Services. It is supported by Dynamics AX 2009 in a way there there is tools and platforms to develop reports than honor the security from within AX and also the important feature of being able to persist the report design back to the Application Object Tree (under Report Libraries).
How to setup and configure SSRS for Dynamics AX 2009 is a topic on it's own, but there should be plenty of good resources out there to help you.
Good luck!
In addition to previous answers you can use any report designer you like if you are going working with database directly.
But be ready some of axapta features will not be working automatically, for example - labels for enum values.
Great place to start with SSRS using Visual Studio 2008 are screencasts available on youtube, just go onto youtube and search for "AX2009 SSRS".
SSRS is fine for periodic reporting, however "online" reporting - such as invoices, pick lists, etc (anything printed when posting) is better off handled by external software. You may wish to print to file or to a DB and use 3rd party software to pick up the design/formatting.
Bottomline's Create Forms is one example I have seen used. You also have workflow options which is great when you have different companies/customers/suppliers with difference requirements, even better if you have multiple brands within the same company.
Related
How can I write plugins, workflows or JS for trial instance of Dynamics 365 for Operations using Visual Studio, like we do for MS Dynamics CRM online instance?
Unfortunately in Dynamics 365 Operations we cannot write plugins but we can create an out of box custom functionality known as "Developer Tools Addin" for performing any kind of functionality in a short and smooth way. The way to write the code is completely available in C#.
Microsoft has tried to bring X++ very close to the semantics of C# as now it as well has been counted in the list of .Net Compliant Languages.
No, We cannot write plugins, workflows, JS in Operations like CRM.
Dynamics 365 for Operations (AX) is totally different ball game when compared to Dynamics CRM (wrt architecture & stack).
Dynamics 365 for Operations is using x++ (.xpp) for custom developments & comparison with C# here
We have used Sharepoint as web client for AX, bcoz that time only thick client was available for AX. In that front, Dynamics 365 for Operations come up with strong Azure stack in cloud space.
I'm currently investing Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Birt as possible reporting engines to integrate with the custom software my company develops.
I don't need ETL or OLAP style features. Rather, I want a more productive wysiwyg report designer with a simple deployment option for embedding/deploying over the web.
Are there any recommendations out there that I'm missing?
Thanks a lot.
Not open source, but DBxtra, have an easy to use wysiwyg editor for both the report and the query, and let you embed the reports you create with the Web Report Widget function, the only downside: it run only on Windows, so depending of the platforms you want to deploy your custom software, it may not be useful for you.
I need to generate reports from database (billing forms for example) from ASP.NET interface. So I'm wondering which approach is better : Use Crystal Reports, reports based on RDLC or SQL Reporting Services ? I need to create an interface, which allows user to select data and through pre-created report definition generate that report. I want to use ASP.NET with AJAX, so it will act as a real application, but with no need for installation - and this is primary requirement.
So, if somebody knows which technology suits best those requirements...I will be grateful :)
Personally I would go for DevExpress XtraReports.
I have used it in the past in both windows forms and web forms; it costs few hundreds of bucks but with the package you also get plenty of other UI controls, or you spend less and only buy XtraReports. It pays off in a flash, main advantages in my opinion are:
each report can be designed with a Visual Studio integrated designer and becomes a simple c# class, easy to instantiate and use, no magic and no external report definitions, all pure 100% .NET code;
end user designed is royalty free and users are amazed by the power and quality of the designer, with Ribbon or classic UI, plenty of features;
so many out of the box zero coding ready to use features like print preview, export to excel, pdf etc...
Disclaimer: I do not work for DevExpress, I am not paid by them, simply I am a satisfied customer and used their products before with joy and good results, we are now in the process of starting a major MVC application development in my company and we are buying licenses of their DXperience Enterprise subscription these days.
you are free to also evaluate or test Crystal Reports or similar reporting solutions offered by ActiveReports, Telerik etc, I can only speak about XtraReports because I used it a lot, Crystal I used in the past with Visual Studio 2003 but I was not so impressed by the designer and deployment was really a mess in windows forms... always missing some files and having errors on client machines...
I would suggest taking a look at ActiveReports 6. It provides great features and allows you to make almost unlimited customization to your report. For ASP.NET you can either opt for the standard edition which allows you to custom export your reports to different formats like PDF, Excel etc and display them to the users.
The professional edition provides you a webviewer control which allows you to display reports directly on the viewer and the user has the option to chose from PDF, HTML and FlashViewer format. In addition to this it also provides a silverlight based viewer control.
You may also want to check the blogs and the forums just in case you want to get more information about the product.
Thanks,
Sankalp (GrapeCity)
Don't miss to take a look into List & Label, too.
We've done some good projects with it!
We use SQL Server Reporting services, it has a visual studio based designer, and it's free. The distribution is a little tricky - If your clients already have SQL Server installed, then there is a a good chance they will have the reporting framework installed. Otherwise you can get just about distribute the dll's with your application - although this takes a bit of digging.
My clients are trying to revive an ASP.NET 1.0 application (yes, you read that right) that generated data-driven Visio Gantt diagrams. I have access to the code (VB.NET), but there are no notes, comments, or documentation, and no employees from 2003 still around. Compounding the issue, I'm pretty new on the scene (ASP.NET 3.5+ only), so the project structure looks very foreign to me (.resx files?).
I've tried including Visio Interop libs with little success. I tried following this article , but when adding the MS Visio 12.0 type library reference to the project solution in VWD Express 2010, I get an error that reads, "A reference to "Microsoft Visio Viewer 12.0 Type Library" could not be added. Converting the type library to a .NET assembly failed. No process is associated with this object." I don't know what that means but I sense it'll be a huge headache to resolve.
At this point I'm stuck and considering porting this feature to more a current platform. Can anybody suggest anything?
Visio has an xml format (.vdx)
If you don't need Visio to help you with layout or connections, you might be able generate the xml files, then have your ASP app serve them up as consumable Visio files.
If you need Visio's Gantt-chart add-in features, or Visio's export to web or image features, then this might not be the way to go. But if you only need to place shapes on a page, set text and other data fields, and have a fairly simple layout and simple connecting lines, you should be able to go this route.
The last download link in this article is for a presentation on Visio and XML that I gave a while back:
http://www.visguy.com/2006/11/30/visio-and-xml-conference-resources/
You should not access the automation API of any Office program from ASP.NET or any other server environment. It is unsupported, will fail at random, and may cause you to violate the terms of your license with Microsoft.
Tell them "no". You'll be much happier.
Well, you may download and use Aspose.Diagram library. It works with Microsoft Visio files without the installation of Microsoft Office Visio. Developers can create, open and manipulate the elements of diagrams and export to many other supported file formats. Based on your scenario, you may get details from a database backend and then create Visio diagrams. It is achievable using Aspose.Diagram API. Please refer to the technical resources of Aspose.Diagram for .NET API.
I work as a Developer Evangelist at Aspose.
I've been doing research on reporting suites for a project my company is about to undertake, and have narrowed the candidates down to Active Reports and Crystal Reports.
During the demo yesterday, it was clarified to me that one of the capabilities our client would like is the ability for the end-user to create custom reports integrated into the Web-Based client. I know that both packages have options for integrating an end-user designer to a WinForms based app, but I can't find a definitive straight yes or no answer for either suite as to whether or not it's possible to attach them to an ASP.Net based app.
My instinct is no, but I was hoping somebody with more experience in reporting suites could give me a solid yes or no.
I can't speak for Active Report, but it's not hard to find someone who loathes Crystal Reports. AFAIK crystal report editing on web requires BOXI which cost allot but includes a much better reporting tool called web intelligence or "webbi", think of it as a web based pivot table.
No mater which produced you end up choosing if you don't have a star schema the end users are going to have a hard and frustrating time creating reports. Even if you have an abstraction layer you are going hit walls.
Curious why did you decide against SSRS? If you already own SQL server you already have a license.
I used to love activereports. Haven't used them in a while. Did you know that visual studio has built in reporting? So does SQL Server.
I agree with jms, it's not hard to find someone who hates crystal reports.