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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
All of the data entered into a CRM means nothing if it is unable to report the important information to our managers and executives in such a way that they can easily and quickly get the results they need. A better reporting system would enable them to make the necessary improvements to the processes that any business needs in a dynamic business world.For users and developers wishing to take advantage of using the report capabilities of Dynamics CRM, this is the book for you.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting is a practical and excellent reference guide that provides you with a number of different options you can use to create and empower the Reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM. This will give you a good grounding in using the reports in your Dynamics CRM 2011 implementations.
This book looks at all the different options we can use to create reports in Dynamics CRM 2011, starting with SQL Reporting Services and custom reports, created in either CRM Report Wizard, SQL Report Builder, or Visual Studio. It will also show other options we can use such as dashboards, charts, and different ways to optimize and automate reports.We will also learn how to build our own reports either using the different wizards for basic reports or using Visual Studio for more complex reports. We will explore the options mobile CRM users have who want to run and see reports on these mobile devices.
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Seitenzahl: 194
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
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First published: June 2013
Production Reference: 1180613
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-84968-230-5
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Credits
Author
Damian Sinay
Reviewers
Nishant Rana
James Wood
Acquisition Editor
Vinay Argekar
Commissioning Editor
Shreerang Deshpande
Lead Technical Editor
Mayur Hule
Technical Editors
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Copy Editors
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Proofreaders
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Graphics
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Cover Work
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About the Author
Damian Sinay has over 15 years experience in the software development and IT industry. He started working with the .NET framework when its first Version 1.0 was in the beta stage. In 2002, he won first prize in the "Building solutions based on XML Web Services" contest, which spanned across Latin America, by Microsoft. In 2006, he wrote his first book in his native language (Spanish) on web services with C# development.
He started working with CRM solutions prior to the first release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's initial version. Since then, he has exclusively been developing and implementing solutions for Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. He is certified in Versions 3.0, 4.0, and 2011 including development, installation, configuration, and implementation of Dynamics CRM. He has around 18 Microsoft certifications (MCP) in SQL, C#, ASP.NET, TFS, Project, CRM, and SharePoint 2007 and 2010. Among many other things, he has co-authored the Dynamics CRM unleashed books for Versions 4.0 and 2011.
He held the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in Dynamics CRM in 2012 and serves as the CEO of Remoting Coders, a Microsoft Partner company that is turning 10 years old in 2013, providing solutions using Microsoft products and technologies.
You can contact Damian at <[email protected]>, follow him on Twitter at @damiansinay, and can also read the blog at http://www.remotingcoders.com/Blogsite/.
I would like to especially thank my wife Carina Godoy de Sinay and my kids who have been positive and unconditional supporters.
I would also like to thank my clients, my colleagues, Microsoft MVPs, the Microsoft CRM product team, and my partners who have provided invaluable opportunities for me to expand my knowledge and shape my career.
About the Reviewers
Nishant Rana currently works at Microsoft Services Global Delivery (MSGD). He has done his specialization in the Microsoft .NET technology and has been actively involved with it since its release. His main focus area has been Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. He is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist and an IT professional in Dynamics and SharePoint, and a MCAD (Application Developer) for .NET.
He has also reviewed the book entitled Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Application Design, Mahendar Pal, Packt Publishing.
You can contact Nishant via his website or Twitter account:
http://nishantrana.wordpress.com/
https://twitter.com/nishantranaCRM
I would like to thank my family and my friends for their love, care, and support.
James Wood is a consultant at Gap Consulting with skills in the end-to-end implementation of enterprise-level Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions. He graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a First Class degree in Computer Games Programming before making the switch to business applications.
He has worked with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for three years and is an able developer of bespoke applications. He has worked on a number of small to large implementations in sectors including local and regional government, education, defense, banking, manufacturing, and welfare.
He has also worked as a technical reviewer for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Application Design and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: An expert cookbook for securing, customizing, and extending your CRM apps.
You can read his blog at www.woodsworkblog.wordpress.com.
I would like to thank my family and friends for everything—especially Mum, Dad, Rob, and Chloё.
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Preface
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting is a practical reference guide that provides you with a number of different options you can use to create and empower the reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM. This will give you a good grounding for using the reports in your Dynamics CRM 2011 implementations.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Introduction to Reporting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM explains the different types of reports we can use in Dynamics CRM. Further, it explains SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and how to install the Dynamics CRM 2011 Extensions. It also covers how to install the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Report Authoring Extension, which we are going to use and explain later in this book.
Chapter 2, Database Basics explains the entity-relationship model of Dynamics CRM; we will review the basic and advanced commands of the SQL language as well as the FETCH XML language that we will need to use in order to create the queries we will use in our reports. We are going to keep using these two languages in the following chapters.
Chapter 3, Creating Your First Report in CRM helps us to create our first report using the Report Wizard and also to export the report to be edited with Visual Studio 2008, where we will make some customizations to reupload the report in Dynamics CRM. We will also see how to publish the report to be visible on the Reporting Server manager for external use.
Chapter 4, SQL Server Report Builder helps us to create our first report using the Report Builder and shows us the features we can use that were not available in the standard CRM Report Wizard. We will also create an advanced report using the Map Wizard, where we will show the records held by the USA.
Chapter 5, Creating Contextual Reports explains the advanced tools and controls we can use to create reports with Visual Studio. We will review the CRM Report parameters and the chart controls. This chapter explains the differences between the data source and datasets, and finally looks at how to use the groups, drill-down and collapsible controls in reports.
Chapter 6, Creating Inline Reports shows us how we can embed a report inside any entity form by creating a custom solution that uses an HTML web resource. We will also see how to implement this custom solution on the account entity using the account overview report. We will then review the development toolkit, which will help us work in a more organized manner with custom CRM solutions to get the benefit of IntelliSense. The deployment capability also allows us to integrate our source code with a source controller software, such as the Team Foundation server.
Chapter 7, Using Reports and Charts in Dashboard shows us how we can integrate a report in a CRM Dashboard and explains the chart basics as well as more advanced details; this is always a good option to display important information about the CRM system if we don't want to use reports.
Chapter 8, Advance Custom Reporting and Automation shows us how we can integrate a custom ASP.NET or Silverlight application to show a dynamic or more sophisticated report inside Dynamics CRM 2011. We will look at the different ways to bind CRM data by using early or late binding methods, and finally we will look at some ways to automate SSRS reports by either using scheduling or by automating export report generation with code.
Chapter 9, Failure Recovery and Best Practices shows us how we can troubleshoot different authentication issues we might face when working with reports in Dynamics CRM, as well as the different ways to improve the report development performance and deployment by using some of the best practices for SQL Reporting Services.
Chapter 10, Mobile Client shows us the new features of Dynamics CRM and SQL Server 2012 to show and run reports on mobile devices, such as iPhone, iPad, and Surface. We will look at how to configure the IFD authentication so we can give external users access to our on-premise CRM environment.
Appendix, Expression Snippets shows us some basic expressions and how we can use them in our reports; we will learn how to use constants, variables, and functions, as well as using external .NET assemblies by using the references. Finally, we will look at the user interaction controls that will help us interact with the users.
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
This book is an indispensable guide for users and developers new to Dynamics CRM Reports and SQL Server Reporting Services, and who are looking to get a good grounding in using the reporting capabilities of Dynamics CRM 2011. It's assumed that you will already have some experience in HTML and JavaScript to build advanced reports, but no previous programming experience is required to build and learn how to create some basic to intermediate reports, which will be used for the exercises within this book.
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Chapter 1. Introduction to Reporting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 makes extensive use of reporting, which we will be covering through this entire book. Reporting is a very important piece of any system that is heavily used by managers or upper management roles, such as the CEO and COO, of any enterprise. In this chapter we will cover:
CRM report types
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 allows different types of reports; not only can the SQL Reporting Services reports be used, but other custom reports, such as Crystal Reports, ASP.NET, or Silverlight reports can also be integrated.
Dynamics CRM can manage the following types of reports:
The RDL files can be created in either of the following two ways:
Dynamics CRM 2011 comes with 54 predefined reports out of the box; 25 of them are main reports and 29 are subreports. If for some reason you don't see any report as shown in the following screenshot, it means Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting Extensions were not installed. This is something that can only happen for on-premise environments; if you are working with CRM Online, you don't need to be worried about any report-extension-deployment tasks.
CRM report settings
Reports in Dynamics CRM have the following settings or categories that you can access by clicking on the Edit button of each report, as shown in the following screenshot:
In the Report: Account Summary window you will see two tabs, General and Administration.
The Administration tab will show the name of the owner of the report, when the report was created or updated and who did it, and whether it is viewable to the user or the entire organization.
In the General tab, you will see the name of the report and the description. If it is a subreport, we will see the parent report displayed. Lastly, in the Categorization section, you can see the following settings:
We will study each of these settings in detail.
Categories
By default, there are four categories created out of the box in every CRM organization:
You can change, add, or remove these categories by navigating to Settings | Administration | System Settings | Reporting as shown in the following screenshot:
These report categories are used so that you can filter reports by each category when the predefined views are available in the main Reports interface, as shown in the following screenshot:
Notice that if you add a new category, you will also have to create the view as it won't be created automatically.
Related Record Types
The Related Record Types option allows you to select what entities you want the report to be displayed under.
The reports will be listed under the Run Report button that is on the Ribbon. There are two locations where the report will be listed on the entities you selected: the home page grid and the form.
The home page grid is where you see all the records of an entity (depending on the view you selected) as shown in the following screenshot:
Almost every entity in Dynamics CRM has a RunReport button. As you can see, there are some reports that can run on the selected records and there are others that only run on all records. We will see how to configure this in detail when we go deeper into report development with Visual Studio in Chapter 5, Creating Contextual Reports.
The form is the second place where the Run Report button is located and it is visible on the form record that you will see when you open a record; the report will only affect that record.
Display in
As we saw in the Related Record Types option, we can decide here where we want to show our report. The options are:
The first option will make the report available on the Run Report button, which is on the form ribbon of an entity record as we have seen earlier.
The lists for the Related Record Types option appears on the home page grid ribbon button.
The Reports area refers to the main reporting interface that is in the Workplace.
Languages
This last option of the Categorization section allows us to specify the language of the report. We have the option of selecting all the languages on the list if you want your single report to be displayed in any of these languages. This is helpful if we have the different language packs installed on the CRM Server and the organization has people from different countries who understand different languages. By default all the reports are based on the local language.
