After developing SSRS-reports in Dynamics AX 2012 for at least six month here are the first impressions what is possible – and more important – what is no longer possible with the new SSRS reporting engine in Dynamics AX:
Header/Footer:
There is only one header, one body and one footer available per report. It is no longer possible to use a second header or footer (like Prolog/Epilog or Programmable Section) in a report.
This means it is no longer possible to use a secondary footer for an invoice summary with single positions one below the other. To make it worse: Hiding header or footer on a page only means that the content of the header and footer is not displayed. But: The space which would be consumed by the non-hidden header/footer (by setting the height) cannot be used in report and is displayed as a white space in the report.
If header/footer is only displayed on the first or last page of report the size should be set as small as possible to prevent waste of space on the pages where header/footer are not displayed.
Note: Behavior of header/footer vary between running report in Visual Studio or in Dynamics AX 2012 because in Visual Studio a hidden header/footer by Property “Show on first/last page” is not displayed at all and wastes no space.
Missing property “LabelTabLeader” (for automatic setting of colons after labels):
The property “LabelTabLeader” was an AX-standard till Dynamics AX 2009 to set dots and colons automatically after a label like this: “….:”. In SSRS reporting engine for Dynamics AX 2012 this property is no longer available. Even "better": According to Best Practices for designing SSRS reports colons are no longer officially supported.
Workaround suggested by Microsoft Support: Set colons manually with an expression like =":" after every label. Problem: Every default report has to be changed.
We asked for a change request at Microsoft’s SSRS/AX 2012-Team, because we do not have the time to edit every used default report manually. According to Microsoft support re-implementing the “LabelTabLeader”-property is not a simple job and still discussed at Microsoft.
Setting an element in a fixed position at the bottom of the report:
As mentioned above: There is only one report-footer available and because of technical restrictions you cannot size it as big as sometimes needed for example for an invoice summary where the single positions are one below the other. Common requirement is that the invoice summary is based on the bottom of the summary independently of the used space above the summary.
With Dynamics AX 2009 it was rather simple to achieve this requirement: You just used a programmable section only on the last page.
Because there is no second footer available we tried several other things to fix the sales summary at the bottom of the invoice-report but outside the footer. But we always failed.
Microsoft Support confirmed that there is no option in SSRS reporting engine available to fix an element on a specific space on report if it is not possible to place the element in header or footer.
This issue is also topic of a change request, which is also still discussed at Microsoft.
Paper Size of default Dynamics AX 2012 reports:
According to Microsoft Best Practices an AX 2012 report has to be designed in a way which allows the report to be printed in US letter and also in DIN A4.
Unfortunately most of the default reports are designed in a way which uses US letter paper size in its complete width without proper margins. Because the width of DIN A4 is 210mm and the width of US letter is 216mm a lot of white pages are printed in DIN A4.
This means that a lot of the default reports have to be redesigned to be used proper by users outside USA.
Update 06.02.2012:
Starr informed me that my statement, that all the reports are optimized for US Letter is wrong. He checked some more reports which were not optimized for DIN A4 or US Letter at all. Indeed he is right: I have checked some of more reports and some paper-sizes I discovered were not neither US Letter nor DIN A4. It seems that when many columns needed to be displayed width was set to fit all columns even the report was not really printable anymore.
He also asked what we do to make the reports printable: Our solution is simple but also time-intensive: Together with our client we identified the most important reports which need to be printed and all these reports will be redesigned. Not because of the wring paper-sizes but also because of the “beautiful” design of the standard-reports.
This was the first part of “What’s no longer possible in AX-reports”. Part 2 will follow soon and there are still some more nasty restrictions of SSRS for Dynamics AX 2012 which were unknown in Morph X-reports for Dynamics AX 2009 and prior.
