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Microsoft Great Plains has long tradition to deploy Crystal Reports, where it sembedded reporting tool ReportWriter does not provide required reportingflexibility, especially for high quality reports with graphical elements, such aslogos, advanced fonts, plus where you need advanced reporting logic. Report Writercan only deal with Dexterity tables from one GP module. Crystal Reports allows youto build any SQL query you need and join cross-modules tables, including customtables and tables and data in heterogeneous databases environments: Oracle, DBII,Pervasive SQL, Ctree, MySQL, and other ODBC compliant platforms. Let s reviewCrystal Reports design techniques:1. Designing Report vs. Query Building. If you are new to Crystal Reports design,we certainly understand the temptation to use wizard to create report. Unfortunately, we saw the results, when programmer was very disappointed and endedup complaining that report shows duplicate records, doesn t show all therecords , etc. You should probably think about what report designer is and what itis not. Crystal Reports is excellent report designer, but in order to providereport designer the records set you should use other tools. Let s move to the nextparagraph2. Stored Procedures and SQL Views; unions. The most flexible query buildinginstrument is stored procedure. Crystal Report should submit parameters to storedprocedure and so create relevant records set for the report. In SQL View you canuse Crystal Report parameters for limiting view results to be included in thereport. Stored procedure, comparing to the SQL view, allows you to use internaltemporary tables to build the most sophisticated result set in view you can notuse temp tables. Unions allows you to combine Work, Posted and Historicaltransactions, for example to be included in report3. Example One. Imagine you would like to display SOP work and historical invoicesin the same report. You should create SQL view, where you will unionize SOP10100and SOP30200 tables, assuming that you would like to show each invoice total in thereport4. Example Two. Imagine, you are selling serialized items and you would like toshow the report on Item history: from whom and when it was purchased, to whom andwhen it was sold. In this case you create cross modules SQL view, where you joinPOP receiving lines and SOP historical tables
Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum Group, http://www.albaspectrum.comhe lp@albaspectrum.com 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, serving Microsoft Dynamics GPUSA and Canada nationwide: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Windsor, New York,San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Pittsburg, Toledo, Indianapolis,Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Seattle, San Diego, Phoenix, Austin. Local service is available in Chicago and Houston metros: Rosenberg, Katy, Richmond,Dallas, Galveston, Sugar Land, Naperville, Wheaton, Plainfield, Aurora, Wheaton,Downers Grove, Lisle, Oakbrook, Morris, Marseilles, Joliet, Montgomery, Oswego,DeKalb. With reasonable travel we serve Springfield, Bloomington, Normal, Peoria,LaSalle, Ottawa, Dixon
