SRS reports – Dynamics AX BI

Parameterise the AX 2012 Financial dimensions in an SRS report

Have you tried to build an SRS report on the transactional database, then queried the financial dimensions and displayed them in the report – yes, OK what about offering the report consumer the option of selecting a financial dimension as a multi value parameter?

Displaying the dimensions in the report is not easy but there are many resources that give lots of code examples. If the report is easy than a standard AOT query will give you all you need with Dimension display methods.

The hard part is accepting a parameter value from the report consumer and passing that into your query. Here I will show you how. Remember LedgerTrans and how easy it was to work with dimensions well read on.

I will not create the actual report here but I will create the data source that you can use in a query or data provider. First what is the problem. If you said Microsoft referential integrity gone mad, I hear you, but no. The problem is that you just can’t create a query joining the dimension metadata and then add a range to that structure. Or can you?

We are going to create a data source that displays the individual values for Main account category, Accounting Date, Business Unit, Cost center, Department and AmountMST. From this data source you can use all the technics for queries, ranges, multi-value parameters etc. This also offers excellent performance as the results are aggregated and queried on SQL before we get them.

Here is an example of the data in the structure we will create.

The AOT View data structure looks like this

(I have added optional ranges for AccountingDate = (YearRange(0,0)) and AccountCategoryRef = 33)

So this is the end result, closer examination shows the use of 3 further views

AdGeneralJournalViewDept
AdGeneralJournalViewCost
AdGeneralJournalViewBusUnit

The AdGeneralJournalViewDept is an AOT View with 2 fields, Department and LedgerDimension. The other 2 Views have CostCenter and LedgerDimension and BusinessUnit and LedgerDimension.

I have created 3 queries one for each View, lets look closely at the Department query.

BackingEntityType Range has a value of 11765 for the department values only.

This data structure is replicated for cost center and business unit queries. The BackingEntityType range value is the only object that changes, for Business Unit 11763 and for cost center 11764. You get these unique values from the DimensionAttribute table.

Once the 3 queries are created add them to 3 new AOT Views. We only need the DisplayValue and LedgerDimension fields from the Query. Change the View field name of the DisplayValue field in each View, ie Department, CostCenter, BusinessUnit. This is the View for the department values.

Now you are ready to build the main AOT View. Here are the relationships you need to set from your new dimension Views back to the GeneralJournalAccountEntry table. Now all joins in a View are InnerJoins only the queries can handle the outerjoins so set this type of join in the queries if needed.

Add the fields you need, add the aggregations and ranges in the View. I have aggregated the Accounting Currency Amount and added 2 ranges on Accounting Date and Main account category for added performance.

Now you have a data source that can easily be used to present and query financial dimensions in AX 2012. Welcome back LedgerTrans!

There are many reasons why you might want to do this but there are also many tools that already work well with the dimensions. After updating the standard AX Cubes you have all dimensions easily available, Management reporter handles dimensions and Atlas as well. Make sure you use the right tool.

Build an AX 2012 SRS report based on cube dimensions and measures

They are lots of really good resources dedicated to building SRS reports for AX 2012 using data providers and queries for transaction reporting. I searched and searched and was never able to find any resource that could demonstrate to me how to do the analytical reporting based on the OLAP database.

This is not for newbies even though what I’ll show you is easy, if you are new to Dynamics and reporting I would highly recommend the series of videos by Saveen Reddy – this is how I started 4 years ago.

The MDX language is an art all of its own and being able to write these queries was always a barrier to producing OLAP reports. What I didn’t know is that you do not need to know anything about MDX! But you do need to be able to work with the SQL SAS instance and Visual Studio. I will demonstrate all the steps to build your first SRS report using an MDX query.

Prerequisites

Fully processed and updated OLAP database, steps to do this are here.

So what report shall we build? Something very simple – Customer invoice amount per year. I’ll ignore the Company Id but you will need to parameterise it later, what we want is our first MDX report.

Open Visual Studio and create a project and report framework as you have done many times before.

Add a dataset and give it a good name.

Set the Data Source property to DynamicsAXOLAP. Now we need an MDX query. I will show you how to get this in Visual Studio but you can also do it on the OLAP database as well.

Open a new instance of Visual Studio and select File > Open > Analysis Services Database…

Browse to the SAS Instance and wait for it to open. Our report will be on the Sales cube so lets open that cube. On the browser tab drag the measure and dimension you want. This is the result for me.

We will use the MDX statement created here and embed that into our SRS report. Switch the designer to show the MDX code and copy it.

On the dataset of the report paste the MDX

Now we can create the report using what ever style you like. I will build a Bar Chart. Change the Default Layout on the Dataset from Table to BarChart and drag it onto the Designs node to make your AutoReport.

Set the Layout Template to “RoleCenterReportLayout” and change the AutoReport name to BarChart.

Set the Style template to BarChartStyleTemplate and change the chart sizing to suit.

Change the display labels as the MDX default is not a good look and you should have something like this.

Once you are happy with the labels formatting titles etc deploy the report. Create a menu item in the AOT and open it to run the report.

Now you are ready for something a little more complicated!

Production Route Card SSRS report

In the Production model is a report to print the Route card, when selected from the Reports area there is no problem but when selected from the Production order it fails. It fails because the report controller is not looking for the Production order origin.

To replicate the bug select a production order and on the ribbon bar in the Process area select Release. This opens another dialog with 3 print options Print job card, Print route job and Print route card. Select the Route card option and click OK.

In the ProdRouteCardController class the setRange method is a missing block of code in the case statement.

Add the following

//Start Microsoft bug in AX 2012 R3 and below. Code to be removed when hotfix provided

case tablenum(ProdParmRelease):

prodParmRelease = this.parmArgs().record();

prodId = prodParmRelease.ProdId;

break;

//End

Label files and SRS static reports

Labels not showing on your AX documents? Or my label works in the AX form but not in the report.

When working with multiple AOS’s it is important that your team maintain a good structure with new labels across multiple languages. If someone forgets just 1 label this can have a knock on effect and the person correcting it will not be too happy.

Firstly always try to use the system labels!

In AX 2012 exporting and importing the ald files is still the easier method to maintain consistency across all AOS’s. You could also select to export ‘only labels’ in the xpo but this could still lead to inconsistencies. Also via your model but for a small customizations or a new report then moving ald’s is easy and quick. Making it easy means better adoption.

Export:

1. In the AOT find the labels node > then the modified label file and the modified language.

2. Select ‘Export to Label file’ which will create your ald file “axTSTen-au.ald”

Import:

1. In the AOT right click the Label Files node and select ‘Create from File’

2. Browse to the label file, you will be asked to overwrite.

Easy! But this is a BI post so what about those static SRS documents, Sales invoice, Sales confirmation etc. These are pre-rendered with translated labels.

You have successfully updated a label in AX 2012 but the change was not actioned in the SRS report. Restarting the AX client, AOS restart, made no difference and the report was definitely using this label, the translation was working perfectly on an AX form, so what is going on?

Basically the report holds onto the old label and restarting the AOS, report servers or client, clearing caches will not make any difference, the only way to get the correct label to be displayed is to redeploy the report, but this will not always work unless you follow the correct procedure!!

The following procedure should be followed after a label change whether you are updating an existing label OR adding a new translation language.

Make the change in the label editor as normal or import the language as above.
Close the AX client, this is because the new label is not ‘released’ until the client is closed.
Restart the AOS
Restart the client in development mode.

Find the SSRS report and deploy it. Job done.

Customer reconciliation report AX 2012

When is a report not a report? When you get a data definition language error with truncation issues of course.

When populating a reporting temp table the EDT’s must be the same, the original transaction table EDT must have the same properties as the temporary table EDT’s. This is fairly obvious but in the Customer reconciliation report this fails because of a mismatch.

The reporting temporary table is CustLedgerReconciliationReportTmp and the Name EDT is 60 char, the Name is coming from the DirPartyTable which is 100 Char. 99% percent of the time it works, but as soon as the customer name is longer than 60 Char it fails with a truncation error.

Solution is easy and know you know the issue I’m sure you can fix it!

Path to run the report is General Ledger > Reports > Reconciliation > Customer > Customer.