Report templates

When you are charged with building a lot of reports it typically involves a lot of work that you always need to repeat. Having a template available that you can reuse can drastically cut down development time. Dynamics NAV and Visual Studio both have options available that you can use to create and reuse templates. Templates can be report parts or even complete pre-built reports.

One option, perhaps the best option, is to create a dummy report that contains the look and feel of the reports that you need to develop, because it is in the database, and so not bound to the filesystem or workstation that you are working on. For example, the header and footer of most document reports always contain the same information from the same tables, such as company information, including addresses and logos, and/or the number of copies option. You can create one report with a simple dataset, for example with an integer data item, and then build the report layout based on that dataset. Then...