How Do I: Create a mini Report Inspector?

You might be aware of this idea:

• https://experience.dynamics.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=c7f30764-d247-e911-867a-0003ff68f3db

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:

• https://github.com/srenders/blog/tree/master/ExportReportDataset