Dynamics AX 2009: Business Intelligence – Choosing Auto Design Layouts for Data sets - Saveen Reddy's blog - Site Home

RECAP

In the last post i described how to use a Data Method to generate random data for a Data Set to form this report.

In this post we shall focus on what it takes to automatically create a design from a Data set.

First, you drag-and-drop the Data set you want on to the Designs node and a new Auto Design is created.

Second, you set the layout style template for the design and then the style template for the data being shown.

In all the examples I’ve shown, you’ve seen the results of this operation show up as a table. The question now to ask is why is it that the design rendered a table as opposed to some other thing.

WHY WAS A TABLE CHOSEN?

Simple, the Data set has a property called Default Layout

And the fact that it is set to Table is what controls the kind of report element is used to render the data when you perform the drag-and-drop action.

WHAT OTHER CHOICES DO WE HAVE?

Quite a few as it turns out.

Drop-and-drop for Table, TopDownList,and HorizontalList work for any dataset – you can just drag and drop any dataset with these as the Default layout and the corresponding kind of report will be seen.

For the chart types, you need to do some extra work on the dataset.

TABLE LAYOUT

TOPDOWN LIST LAYOUT

HORIZONTAL LIST LAYOUT

WHAT ABOUT MATRIX AND THE CHARTS?

If you drag-and-drop them without any additional work on your Data set you’ll need see that a design cannot be created. Below there are screenshots of what happens. I want you to be familiar with what these error messages look like so that when you encounter them in creating your own reports you will know what them mean.

In a future post I will explain how to setup the Data set correctly so that using drag-and-drop on these styles will work.