Anatomy of the report object
Requests for new reports come from every department and in many different forms. Most of the time, users have an idea in mind of how they would like the data to be shown.Nevertheless, a report developer should always keep in mind some important points. Everything is related to data:
- Retrieval: A good report developer should have a good knowledge of the business process (how data is created, modified, and deleted) and data topology (where data is stored). Data can be retrieved from heterogenous resources that cannot be directly stored in Dynamics 365 Business Central tables. As an example, you might want to run a HTTP call to a web service to gather some data outside the database and store it in a physical or temporary table before processing it.
- Processing: Some of the data that is presented could be the result of data aggregation, could be calculated from different fields, or could even be the results from a concatenation of values from different tables...
