Report data flow
One of the principal advantages of the NAV report is its built-in data flow structure. At the beginning of any report, you define the data items (the tables) that the report will process. We can create a processing only report that has no data items (if no looping though datasets is required), but that situation often calls for a codeunit to be used. In a report, NAV automatically creates a data flow process for each DataItem, or table reference. This automatically created data flow provides specific triggers and processing events for each of data item:
Preceding the data item
After reading each record of the data item
Following the end of the data item
The underlying "black-box" report logic (the part we can't see or affect) automatically loops through the named tables, reading and processing one record at a time. Therefore, any time we need a process that steps through a set of data one record at a time, it is usually easier to use a report object.
The reference to a database...