Jorn Lindhard Mortensen's blog

Moving on

2009-11-02T16:35:00Z

You may have noticed that things have been quiet for a while on this blog, well here is why:

Microsoft Office Accounting will no longer be distributed after November 16, 2009.

As a consequence I have moved on to new challenges within Microsoft, now focusing on Dynamics AX, a product I had worked quite a bit with before my time with Office Accounting. I appreciate the interest, comments and questions about Office Accounting here on the blog, and personally I’m truly sorry to see the end of the product.

cnet

pcpro

I’m planning to keep blogging, as you can imagine the topic will change to Dynamics AX related things.

Office Accounting 2009 US now available - FREE upgrade!

2008-11-17T21:00:00Z

Well it is time for a new version of the us version of Microsoft Office Accounting. Part of the big news this year is that existing Professional users can upgrade for free! Check out this site for more detail. Naturally users of the Express version can also upgrade for free as that version as usual is absolutely free :o)

How can I create new Office Accounting reports that can be seen by low rights users?

2008-08-21T19:14:00Z

A few people have had this problem now: They create a report add-in for Office Accounting but when they deploy to the end users the reports does not show up in the menu. One of those ”but it works for me!!” problems…

A typical reason can be that you forgot to set the AreaAccess property when you registered the report. The value of this property determines what access rights the user needs to be able to see the report:

descriptor.AreaAccess = new PermissionArea[] {

PermissionArea.ManageCompanyFA, PermissionArea.GeneralLedgerTransactionsFA}

Naturally there is another side to this; remember to ensure that a user with the rights you assign actually has access to the data you are trying to show, if not the report may just fail when you try to get the data from the database.

My Office Accounting report’s aging filters need to add new columns

2008-08-11T22:41:00Z

I just got this question:

“The problem is that I am creating a new custom report using the INativeReportV2 interface. I am trying to apply Aging Options Filter to the report. The problem is, how I do capture those values in the CreateDesign method? The CreateDesign method only accepts the IReportDesign parameter, it does not pass in the IReportFiltersV2 parameter. If you can provide any advice on this issue, I’d really appreciate it.”

The only answer I could find is: … you don’t

You can’t do that in the CreateDesign method that is. You will have to cheat and create the columns in another method where you do have access to the IReportFiltersV2 parameter.

CreateData would be a good option for such a method – but then I don’t have access to the IReportDesign !?!

Well you will have to cheat a bit and keep a reference to the design in a class variable, the reference can be set in the CreateDesign method.

Accessing data in an Office Accounting report

2008-06-17T20:03:00Z

I was asked how you can access the data in an Office Accounting report in code. As the code shows below this is very simple – you just have to remember a few things:

· There is no guarantee that the columns in the data view won’t change between versions

· If you use the groups make sure to iterate through the sub groups as that may be where the data lives

ISmallBusinessInstance instance = (ISmallBusinessInstance)sbaObjects.SmallBusinessInstance;

IReportEngineV2 reportEngine = (IReportEngineV2)sbaObjects.ReportEngine;

// Get a report descriptor

IReportDescriptorV2 reportDescriptor

= reportEngine.ReportDescriptorView.GetByName("CustomerTransactionHistory");

// Use the report descriptor to create a report executor

INativeReportExecutorV2 reportExecutor

= (INativeReportExecutorV2)reportEngine.GetReportExecutor(reportDescriptor);

// Let's change a filter on the report

// just to show that you can modify the report before running the report

IReportFilterDateV2 filterDate =

(IReportFilterDateV2)reportExecutor

.ReportProperties.ReportFilters.GetFilter(ReportFilterEnum.DateFilter);

filterDate.DateFilter = DateFilter.All;

// Access the dataView, this will automatically

// run the report if it hasn't been run

DataView dataView = reportExecutor.ReportDocument.DataView;

// Another way To access the data would be through the groups:

foreach (IReportGroupV3 group in reportExecutor.ReportDocument.ReportGroups)

{

// A dataView with the data in this group

DateView dataInThisGroup = group.GroupDataViewRows;

// In some reports groups may have sub groups

// You can easily iterate these as well

foreach (IReportGroupV3 subGroup in group.SubGroups)

{ }

}

New blog on Office Accounting

2008-06-11T22:25:00Z

I just wanted to let you know that my friend John Thuneby has started a new blog about Office Accounting. My guess is that he will write more about the functionality in the application and less about the technical stuff. I know that John welcomes feedback on Office Accounting so if you have any head over there and check out the shiny new blog.

His first post is about the ability to create a template for a company go there to read more about it.

Set up Office Accounting for multiple users

2008-05-13T22:14:00Z

I just saw this article on how to set up Office Accounting for multiple users. As I know this is a topic that people has a lot of questions about I thought I would post a link to it...

At the same time you can find a lot of usefull information in the How To section on that site.

Enjoy

How can I export an Office Accounting report to Excel in code

2008-04-11T19:35:00Z

It has been a while since my last post and I have gotten a few questions. One question was related to exporting reports to Excel.

This is actually pretty simple; you may have noticed the IReportExportToExcelV2 interface. This is the key to this task.

Basically the system report executor implements this interface and therefore you can use it to export.

Time for an example:

// First we need the engine

ISbaObjects sbaObjects = loader.GetSbaObjects(.........);

ISmallBusinessInstance instance

= (ISmallBusinessInstance)sbaObjects.SmallBusinessInstance;

IReportEngineV2 reportEngine

= (IReportEngineV2)sbaObjects.ReportEngine;

// Get a report descriptor

IReportDescriptorV2 reportDescriptor

= reportEngine.ReportDescriptorView

.GetByName("CustomerTransactionHistory");

// Use the report descriptor to create a report executor

INativeReportExecutorV2 reportExecutor

= (INativeReportExecutorV2)reportEngine

.GetReportExecutor(reportDescriptor);

// Let's change a filter on the report

// just to show that you can modify the report before exporting

IReportFilterDateV2 filterDate

= (IReportFilterDateV2)reportExecutor.ReportProperties

.ReportFilters.GetFilter(ReportFilterEnum.DateFilter);

filterDate.DateFilter = DateFilter.Today;

// Now everything is ready and we can cast the

// executor to an IReportExportToExcelV2

IReportExportToExcelV2 exportToExcel

= reportExecutor as IReportExportToExcelV2;

if (exportToExcel != null)

exportToExcel.ExportToExcel();

Pretty easy eh?

Fresh off the press: Office Accounting 2008

2007-11-15T04:12:00Z

Time for some exciting news on brand new Office Accounting versions!!

Today we are releasing the new Office Accounting 2008.

Among the great news we are now releasing new versions; besides the new US version we have now added a new US-Spanish version for the Spanish speaking population in the US…

And many have been asking for a UK version of Office Accounting for a while now, I’m happy to say that you can now download this product as well!

Official press release

How do I use the ReportColumnType and ReportColumnPreferenceType values when I build custom Office Accounting reports?

2007-10-11T23:29:00Z

The question about the ReportColumnType came up in a comment for a prior post, and yeah I guess it’s fair that I tell you about it :o)

First a brief description of the values, from the quick overview you can see that you really do not have that many ColumnTypes to choose from as many of the values are really for internal use only…

ReportColumnType values:

Value	Description
CurrencySymbolColumn	If your report supports multi currency you can use this column type for one column containing the currency symbol (like $ or £) to be used for the foreign currency columns. (See description of ReportColumnPreferenceType for how you can use this Column Type)
CustomizableColumn	This is meant as the ColumnType for customizable columns / User defined columns. The functionality behind this ColumnType is not yet implemented in the infrastructure.
Data	This is the column type used for a normal column shown in a report. Most of your columns should have this type.
GroupID	Internal use only, you should not use this value.
GroupSorting	Internal use only, you should not use this value.
NotVisible	Columns of this type will never be visible in a report. You can use this type for columns you use internally for example if you want to group your report by customer you may want a column containing the CustomerID that you can use for grouping.
Option	This is often used as the column type for the column containing the ID of something you want to drill down to. If your report is showing invoices, you could mark the DocumentID column as a Option column.
ParentColumn	Internal use only, you should not use this value.
RowID	Internal use only, you should not use this value.
RowLabel	This is the first column in the report. If the user scrolls horizontally in the report this column will stay visible. You should only mark one column with this type in your report.
SubColumn	Internal use only, you should not use this value.

So really you should focus on four Column types: RowLabel, Data, CurrencySymbolColumn and NotVisible.

To give the full story about the CurrencySymbolColumn value I need to describe another enumeration in a bit more detail:

ReportColumnPreferenceType values:

Value	Description
AccountCurrency	If your report supports multi currency and you have a column containing the currency code (like USD) you can give the column this PreferenceType and it will only be visible when the user turns on “Use Multi currencies”
AccountCurrencyAmount	If your report has a foreign currency amount (we call it account currency as in the currency of the account) you can mark the column with this preference type. The result is that the column will only be visible when the user turns on “Use Multi currencies” AND the currency symbol on this column will be taken from the column marked with ReportColumnType.CurrencySymbolColumn
CompanyCurrencyAmount	Any company currency amount in your report can be marked with this preference type, the result is that the symbol from your company currency will be used for the column when the user turns on “Use Multi currencies”.
AccountId	Setting any of these values on a column basically means that the column should only be visible if the Company preference related to that value is turned on by the user. For example: If I have a column containing the display number from a financial account I could set the PreferenceType on this column to AccountId, and the column would only be visible if the user has selected “Use account numbers” in the Company Preferences.
Class
CustomerId
EmployeeId
ItemId
Job
JobId
VendorId
None	Default value.

Hope this little overview helps a bit…