Reporting in Dynamics AX 2009 : Reporting Overview

What Is a Report?

A report is simply data from Dynamics AX that has been rendered into human-readable form. For example, at its simplest, a report could be a list of customers shown on the screen. A report could also be a printed piece of paper containing details about a specific customer. A Web page listing inventory is a report. A Microsoft Office Excel worksheet showing all the statistics of on-time deliveries is also a kind of report. This definition of a report is broad, but it reflects the varied, real-world usage of reporting in Dynamics AX.

Reporting and Users

You can categorize reporting on two axes: data depth and business activity. As shown in Figure 1, the role users play in an organization and the reports they use fall at one point (or perhaps several points) on these axes.

Here are some details about the reporting needs of the roles shown in Figure 1:

• A CEO who is interested in monitoring the business periodically uses strategic reports that provide summarized data across time periods.

• An analyst examines the business looking for patterns that might lead to changing business plans and priorities and uses reports that allow the data to be interactively sliced by region or time period. This makes it easier to detect trends and patterns, and the results of this analysis feed into the CEO’s decisions.

• A shop floor worker is concerned with the day-to-day activities of the business and uses reports that reflect the immediate needs of the shop floor. For example, a shop floor worker would use a simple report that lists all the items in the inventory.

Dynamics AX reports help satisfy the needs of these users so that relative to an individual’s role in the business, he or she has the data necessary to be effective.

Providing Reports in Dynamics AX 2009

Dynamics AX 2009 supports both production reports and ad hoc reports. Production reports, which can range from simple to complex, are designed and created by developers. Ad hoc reports are generally simpler and created directly by users, without help from developers.

Report Categories

Dynamics AX 2009 reports fall within three general categories:

• Production reports that use one of the two reporting platforms—MorphX or Reporting Services—supported by Dynamics AX 2009. Developers create these reports because of their complexity.

• Ad hoc reports built on MorphX or Reporting Services. Once developers and administrators have put ad hoc reporting models in place, users can create their own ad hoc reports.

• Ad hoc reports that access Dynamics AX data directly.

Kinds of Reports in Dynamics AX 2009

Table 1 lists the different kinds of reports available in Dynamics AX 2009 and some characteristics of each.

Reporting Platforms in Dynamics AX 2009

Dynamics AX 2009 integrates with two reporting platforms: MorphX, the Dynamics AX–specific reporting platform, and Reporting Services (SQL Server Reporting Services), which is the Microsoft standard reporting platform.

MorphX has been the traditional Dynamics AX reporting platform since the first version of the product and has been supporting customer needs for a long time. Starting with Dynamics AX 2009, Reporting Services is considered the primary reporting platform for the product.

Microsoft decided to shift to Reporting Services as the standard reporting platform for Dynamics AX rather than standardizing on MorphX, which is a proprietary reporting platform, for several reasons, including these:

• Advantages from the availability of a much larger pool of resources, including developers, partners, and training partners who are already familiar with Reporting Services and Visual Studio.

• It aligns with the overall direction in Microsoft to standardize on Reporting Services.

Here are some of the features that Reporting Services offers that are unavailable in MorphX:

• Charting

• Reports using non–Dynamics AX data sources

• Reports using OLAP cube data

• Interactivity

• Ad hoc reporting

Report Entry Points

Users can view reports in Dynamics AX 2009 from several locations. When working in the Dynamics AX client, users can view reports in the following ways:

• Export data from a Dynamics AX list page into an Excel worksheet.

• View and print an auto report, which Dynamics AX can automatically build from any list page or form the user sees.

• Launch MorphX production reports or Reporting Services production reports from menu items.

Even when users are not working in the Dynamics AX client, they can view reports in these ways:

• Go to the Reporting Services Report Manager Web site to locate and launch production reports or ad hoc reports directly.

• Start Excel and connect it to a Dynamics AX cube to analyze Dynamics AX OLAP data via Excel pivot tables.

Figure 2 is a conceptual depiction of how users can access the different kinds of reports available in Dynamics AX.

Figure 2. Kinds of reports in Dynamics AX and how users can access them for viewing