AL programming: Creating a report based on a government form

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Posted on by JT-23101505-0

Hi there, I might be in the wrong forum for this as a developer, if I am, sorry about that.

I have a task to use AL to query data from our Purch Inv. Line table and export the data from it into a PDF form. If I were creating a report from scratch, then I could do everything I need just following the tutorials about making RDL reports from Microsoft's own documentation (starting at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-reports). I've actually managed to make a report, so this tutorial is good for me at least when it comes to making new things.

The challenge I have is taking a pre-existing PDF form and filling that in instead. More specifically, I'm working with the T4A form provided by the Canadian government at https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/forms-publications/forms/t4a.html. At the time of writing, I'm trying to use their Standard Print PDF form, the t4a-24b.pdf form, The Report Builder I'm using doesn't seem to accept PDF files, only Excel/Word/RDL-type files. Would anyone know how I would go about doing this, or could point me to any existing documentation/tutorials about using PDFs as a form template?

Thanks,

Jonathan.

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t4a-24b.pdf

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Martin Dráb 236,471 Most Valuable Professional on at

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AL programming: Creating a report based on a government form

Moved from Integration, Dataverse, and general topics forum to Small and medium business | Business Central, NAV, RMS forum.

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Valentin Castravet 29,882 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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AL programming: Creating a report based on a government form

The way it works is that report layouts are created in Excel, Word or RDLC, not PDF. You would build the layout in Word or RDLC to match your template. When you run the report, you can export or print to Word, or PDF. You don’t design the template in PDF.

Valentin Castravet
Work: Zander ERP Services
Blog: Dynamics 365 Business Central Insights
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-c-0500a247/

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JT-23101505-0 6 on at

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AL programming: Creating a report based on a government form

Does this mean I would have to basically recreate the PDF form, pixel-perfect, as an RDLC report in Power BI Report Builder? If that's the only way, that'll put a damper on things for sure, but it is what it is.

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Rishabh Kanaskar 4,958 on at

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AL programming: Creating a report based on a government form

Hi,

Yes, unfortunately that’s correct for the built-in reporting tools. Business Central’s RDLC/Word layouts don’t allow importing an existing PDF as a template, so if you need the output to look exactly like the government form, you’d have to recreate it in RDLC (or Word layout) and align fields pixel-perfect to match the original.

Thanks

Rishabh

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