Reporting mechanism has become more dynamic and flexible with Microsoft Dynamics CRM that provides a Reporting Wizard that enables Users to create basic reports on-the-fly as well as custom reports and share them with the organization.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM handles all the reports with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SRS), which is a separate application that we can install on a different server than SQL Server or the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server if desired. Microsoft Dynamics CRM then connects to SRS by using the Reporting Services URL.
The Crm solutions provides a platform to desgin reports in 2 ways i.e,
1.out-of-box reports using report wizard:
The Report Wizard is a new feature with this version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that enables Users to build basic reports without development knowledge. The Report Wizard gives Users an easy-to-use interface for building reports. Additionally, the final reports are actually Microsoft SQL SRS reports, or .rdl files, that you can further manipulate using a more advanced editing tool such as Visual Studio.
We can use the Display In option to configure where you want to have the reports available. You can set the following values for this property: Forms for Related Record Types,Lists for Related Record Types,Reports Area.
We can choose any of these values to display the report.
Report filters: All reports in CRM have a special feature that enables you to prefilter the underlying data when you run a report.
Although we can manually change these values and properties every time you run a report, we can also change the default filtering criteria by editing the report definition.
Categories : Reports are divided into categories so that they can be easily found. This is especially useful when working with many custom reports in the organization. By default, only the following four categories are created in the system, but you can easily create more as necessary: Administrative Reports Marketing Reports Sales Reports
Service Reports
2.Custom reports :
We can easily build new basic custom reports with the Report Wizard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM; however, reports created are not so flexible. In some cases, we need to write more complex reports and have a more flexible page layout and design. With those cases, we need to use a tool such as Visual Studio to create and build our custom reports.
The easiest way to create a report in Report Designer is to use the Report Wizard. Like all wizards, the Report Wizard walks us through the process in step-by-step fashion. We can make the following choices in the wizard:
The data source to use The query to use to retrieve data Whether to use a tabular or matrix layout for the report How to group the retrieved data What visual style to use Where to deploy the finished report
Pass the parameters
Another way to create a custom report is to create an ASP.NET web application that displays data and then use the Link to Web Page option to deploy it. Using this method doesn’t enable us to use all the benefits inherent to SRS (including the capability to pass parameters to the reports and also use prefiltering). If we need to create a report using this method, we must handle the filtering options in your application manually.