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Gotta love user Q&A sessions, like the one at Convergence 2015 that I had a privilege to take part in. Questions from users are always refreshing, very often challenging and sometimes they are just the reminder that any small bit of information that one possesses is not necessarily the common knowledge. On this occasion question […]
Tip #337: Using stored procedures with CRM reports
One trick veteran report writers like to use when writing SSRS reports for Dynamics CRM is to use a stored procedure for the report query. There are several appealing reasons to do this: Performance: Stored procedures are cached, which can give them a performance advantage when compared to a query in the report. This advantage […]
Tip #333: Secret reporting parameters
In yesterday’s tip we mentioned the CRM_URL report parameter. But that’s not all folks. One of the best things the aspiring report writer can do is to download the RDL for one of the system reports, such as the Account Summary, and look at the RDL in Visual Studio (after adding to a report project). […]
Tip #332: Report hyperlinks the logical way
When building hyperlinks to CRM in SSRS reports, there is a right way and a wrong way: Wrong way: hard coding your CRM URL. Do not set your URL to “https://crmserver/….” If you do this use the hyperlink will only work in one environment and will have to be rewritten to work in another environment. Right […]
Tip #328: How rollup fileds make charts better
Ever since charts were introduced in CRM 2011, there has been a limit of 50,000 records that could be aggregated via a chart. This limitation is there for performance reasons, and has been a reason why some users with large data sets have stayed away from using charts. CRM 2015 introduces rollup fields, which automatically […]
Tip #299: Schedule CRM on premise reports
Jim “Sourdough Master” Steger sent us a fresh reminder that, despite all the advantages of CRM Online deployments, on premise installations have a few aces up their sleeves when it comes to reporting, and here is one of them: Don’t forget about the ability to schedule SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports when using CRM […]
Tip #242: Don’t forget the default filters
Are your users confused when a CRM report freshly-minted by a report wizard, does not deliver the data they expect? Inspired by our twice the tip, our fellow contributor Andre “I’ve got 88 in my handle” Margono sent us a fresh reminder that “the default filter is something that I often forget to remove/update and […]
Tip #240: Once bitten, twice filtered
Anything that’s been done twice is usually better. That includes double cream and double barreled. Except that report pre-filtering does not work if you need a filtering entity to be included more than once in your SQL. Consider this totally random piece of SQL: You cannot just apply pre-filtering because alias CRMAF_FilteredAccount cannot be used […]
Tip #233: Including external data in internal reports
You want to have a report in Dynamics CRM reference a database other than the Dynamics CRM database. Maybe you want to join external data, like data from your Dynamics AX ERP system, to account data in Dynamics CRM. In many cases, the best answer is to use a data warehouse, Write a report that points to the […]
Tip #219: You want the top one
One of the challenges of creating reports is the lack of real data in development environment. There is not enough Nancies Davolios to simulate real volumes. For that reason alone production organization is often replicated “back” to test and development environments. Reports suddenly come to life and designers can see 7-figures opportunities and otherwise empty […]