You might be aware of this idea:

And if you haven’t yet, please vote 😉

Now recently I came across a post from Bert De Temmerman on Yammer: https://www.yammer.com/dynamicsnavdev/threads/736254082498560 and that got my inspiration flowing…

He suggests that when you add this action to the “Report Layout Selection” page, you can export any dataset by first running the request-page:

And of-course, it works!

So I created a simple codeunit that contains a function that can export a report’s dataset:

And now you can simply call this function in one of the report triggers, for example:

And in the request page of the report you can add an option to enable/disable this export.

Let’s see how this works:

How cool is that!!!

So when you develop a report and the layout does not behave like expected, you can now simply add this option and export the dataset to see if there’s something wrong there, and if not, then at least you know the dataset is correct and the error is probably in your layout 😉

You can download a code example here:

 

5 Thoughts on “How Do I: Create a mini Report Inspector?

  1. Matthias Rabus on July 21, 2020 at 18:20 said:

    Really helpful, thanks

  2. raydilsons on July 28, 2020 at 12:54 said:

    Beautiful work, Steven 👌
    I’ve tried that too, and it works great.
    However, I’ve noticed that that the new Dataset file format is slightly different from what we used to have in the Windows Client. We were able to get a combined single table called DataSet_Result. It was ugly as hell, especially when working with multiple data items, but at least we could see the actual data and its structure that is transferred to RDL.
    The file we get in your example has all the datasets split, which is even better but doesn’t allow debugging specific scenarios.
    Do you have any thoughts on this? Perhaps you have found a way to convert the file we can get with your workaround solution into a DataSet_Result?
    I’d love to hear from you. Many thanks!

  3. Bert De Temmerman on March 3, 2021 at 15:40 said:

    Wow, Strange that I only just now found your blogpost …

    YW 😀

  4. 🙂

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