I barely made it through the first 66 pages of the 112 page training manual on Acumatica Report Designer because it was really dry and boring. To be honest, I didn’t read it carefully, but instead skimmed through.
The concepts are consistent with other report writing programs like SSRS and Crystal Reports and the training material is more like a reference manual than training material. However, I do think that I will be referring back to it in the future since it’s a good resource. For me, the best way to get comfortable with a new report writer is to start writing some reports!
That’s why I was happy to finally see on page 68 how to save and publish a report.
1. Make your report (I just dropped a couple of vendor fields on my report to start with something simple).
2. Go to File -> Save On Server… and give the report a name (I used Vendors.rpx). I also checked the Save as new version box which I’m hoping will keep a snapshot of this version of the report somewhere in the database (with Crystal Reports I always append the date to my versions which is a really duct tape way to do versioning).
3. Now for the cool part. The training course introduced me to the Site Map (SM200520) screen which is how you can make modifications to the Acumatica menu. In this case, all we need to do is add a new item to the menu for the new report. Since this is a vendor report (a really simple one), I decided to put it under Finance -> Accounts Payable -> Reports -> Balance. All I had to do was browse to the folder and then add a new entry (the highlighted one). You can click the image below to get a clearer picture.
4. Now we can browse to the new report and run it.
I’m starting to warm up to Acumatica Report Designer after seeing how easy it is to publish a report and how nicely it integrates into the Acumatica application. I’m sure that SSRS reports still have their place, but a user would definitely notice that they are leaving Acumatica when running an SSRS report. Also, reports created with Acumatica Report Designer become just like any other screen as far as security (who has access) is concerned. On the other hand, SSRS security is maintained in an entirely separate area. Finally, when running a report created in Acumatica Report Designer, a user has no idea whether they are using a standard report or a custom one. This is exactly the kind of experience that I want a user to have when running reports.