A Note Concerning Web Reports through Ax and SSRS

I had a chat with some colleagues yesterday and ventured into the "new" reporting framework, SSRS, that will gradually replace standard Ax reporting.

Last year I mass produced web reports for portal customers. Being Microsoft product users they experienced problems with Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer "helps you" by removing CSS formatting when the document prints. For some of the reports that resulted in serious issues, as the alternating line color was removed from the formatting, resulting in reports that were, to put it mildly, hard to read.

To enable CSS background color printing, which at least the Ax Web reports use:

Open Internet Explorer -> Options -> Advanced -> Printer -> Enable printing of background colors and images.

 (or something, I have the Norwegian language version and am not 100% sure of what the english version says, but it should be a close match).

My colleagues argued that chiefly the list reports would be targeted for SSRS, and no one would print those. My experiences last year suggest otherwise.

Believe me, the customers want to be able to print any report, and they want to be able to read it easily as well.

The morale of the story?

Enable that CSS formatting.

http://daxguy.blogspot.com/2006/12/temporary-tables.html

Useful walkthrough of temporary tables. I am debugging Ax's Tax Engine to unearth which parameters cause a currency unaware flat VAT of 93 ^^. Let me just say that in the Tax classes your TmpTable-Fu comes in handy. ;)

Offer reports as downloadable PDF documents in your Dynamics Ax 2009 Enterprise Portal

One thing I've been tasked with a lot in Ax Enterprise Portal is exposing Dynamics Ax reports through the web  interface. True enough, Microsoft has provided us with the means to expose Ax reports in HTML format, but some serious tweaking is in order to present these (the report query window prompt is, among other things, mysteriously absent in enterprise portal). And when you finally master presenting reports through enterprise portal the client should be disappointed at how it looks. They always are. They have to adjust settings in Internet Explorer to keep the CSS in their printed documents, tweak the CSS and the x++ html generator to make it presentable, and the list goes on.

By now one thing should be clear: Microsoft wants us all to switch to SSRS reporting.

But in my opinion standard Ax reporting is useful and exposing it shouldn't be so hard. Invoices for instance: Customers should really be able to download them from your site, so I have crafted a sample that writes a report to PDF and then offers users to download it through a text and image web link.

I've done this for EP 3.0 as well, and it is actually a lot easier, but the basics remain the same. At the core is the DataSet method X++ code that generates the report.

First, somewhere in your .NET user control*, preferably as the invoice details page loads (The Page_Load method for instance), call your dataset method.


*  In a webdefined control in Ax 3.0 Enterprise Portal (override the layout method instead).

private string InvoiceId;

private string pdfUrl = "about:blank";

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

if(!IsPostBack)

{

  InvoiceId = Page.Request.QueryString.Get("IID"); // I passed the invoice id from the grid as a GET parameter

if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(InvoiceId))

{

  pdfUrl = "http://192.168.88.5:8080/Invoice_" + InvoiceId + ".PDF"; //obviously hard coding isn't the way to go

[...]

try

{

  CustInvoiceJour_DS.GetDataSet().DataSetRun.AxaptaObjectAdapter.Call("CreatePDF", InvoiceId); //This is the call to our DataSet method that initiates the X++ code

  InvoiceLink.NavigateUrl = pdfUrl; // object.

}

catch (Exception)

{

throw;

}

}

Here is the X++ DataSet method that generates the PDF invoice.
NOTE: Remember to host the folder as a site in IIS, or use one of Enterprise Portal's public folders. Also, restrict browsing folder contents and remember to delete sensitive customer data after a short while.
NOTE 2: In Ax 3.0 this code must be in the Web Forms run method.

public str CreatePDF(InvoiceId _invoiceId)

{

Args parameters;

ReportRun reportRun;

//Declare SalesFormLetter and PrintJobSettings objects

SalesFormLetter salesFormLetter;

PrintJobSettings printJobSettings;

 CustInvoiceJour cij;

;

SELECT firstonly cij

 where cij.invoiceId == _invoiceId;

parameters = new Args(ReportStr(SalesInvoice));

printJobSettings = new PrintJobSettings();

printJobSettings.setTarget(PrintMedium::File);

printJobSettings.preferredTarget(PrintMedium::File);

 printJobSettings.preferredMailFormat(PrintFormat::PDF); //Not necessary, but residue from the days this method sent an email instead.

printJobSettings.format(PrintFormat::PDF);

 printJobSettings.fileName(@"\\THINK\pdfhost\Invoice_" + cij.invoiceId + ".PDF"); //Write to the IIS hosted virtual directory

salesFormLetter = new SalesFormLetter_Invoice(false);

 salesFormLetter.updatePrinterSettingsFormLetter(printJobSettings.packPrintJobSettings());

parameters.caller(salesFormletter);

 parameters.parmEnum(PrintCopyOriginal::OriginalPrint); //I had to use PrintCopyOriginal::OriginalPrint, instead of ::Original, as other bloggers recommend. Failing to do so meant, in 2009, that the PDF wasn't saved to the file system. In 3.0 ::Original worked just fine.

parameters.parmEnumType(enumnum(PrintCopyOriginal));

parameters.record(cij);

reportRun = new ReportRun(parameters);

reportRun.init();

reportRun.run();

return "";

} 

Hope this helps someone out there!

Thanks to Brandon George and other bloggers out there.
http://dynamics-ax.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_archive.html

Also: Thank you to Justin Biggs
 https://community.dynamics.com/forums/t/32390.aspx