Jorn Lindhard Mortensen's blog : Office Accounting SDK

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

Jorn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:14:00 GMT

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

Jorn — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:41:00 GMT

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.

Add custom filters to your custom Office Accounting reports

Jorn — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:39:00 GMT

What if I have created a INativeReport and I want to filter it, but the build in filters are not exactly what I need?

Well you can create your own filters! It does require some coding though (but we like code, right?).

As an example let’s add a “Region” filter to the “Customers Grouped by Region” report I created in my last post. To do this I need to create a new class that implements IReportFilterGenericV2 and ISerializable.

If you use Visual Studio to implement the IReportFilterGenericV2 interface you will notice a few sections. I’ll run through them quickly:

IReportFilterGenericV2 Members

public void ClearAll() - This method is called if the user clicks the clear button in the filter dialog. Basically you should set the state of the filter back to the default value or “All”.
public IFilterOptionV2[] GetFilterBarOptions(IReportFiltersV2 reportFilters) - The filter can be shown in two places: the filter bar (above the report) or in the filter dialog. This method should return the options to show in the filter bar.
public IFilterOptionV2[] GetFilterDialogOptions(IReportFiltersV2 reportFilters) - This method should return the options to show in the filter dialog

IReportFilterV2 Members

public ReportFilterEnum FilterEnumValue - This Property is used to identify the filter, for Generic filters it should always return ReportFilterEnum.GenericFilter.
public string GetDisplayValue(ISmallBusinessInstance instance) - This method should return the value you want to show in the Filter text in the header of the report.
public string Label - This is the label used in the filter dialog on the left hand side
public void SetValues(IReportFilterV2 filter) - This method is used to move the values from one instance of the filter to another. Basically you should make sure all of your instance data is copied from the argument to “this”.
public bool Visible - A property used to hide the filter. You should simple save this state in a variable so you can return it in the getter.

ICloneable Members

public object Clone()- Standard implementation of ICloneable, here you would typically use the SetValue method for an easy implementation.

For the ISerializable implementation is pretty standard, the serialization is used when users save the report:

ICloneable Members

public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) - This method should add the instance data from the filter to the SerializationInfo object (used when serializing).
public ctor(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) - You need to create a special constructor for the de-serialization, the constructor should set the instance data from the SerializationInfo object (this is used when the user launches the saved report).

I have put a sample implementation of IReportFilterGenericV2 on this page if you would rather look at code…

With all of that work we now have a new filter that will show in the top filter bar in a report and in the filter dialog. To use it we have to add it to the report.

First we need to add the new filter to the report, to do that we add a few lines in the CreateFilters method:

// Add the region filter to the filter collection as a generic filter

RegionFilter regionFilter = new RegionFilter();

reportFilters.AddGenericFilter(regionFilter);

To actually use the filter we will need to apply the filter in the CreateData method. Naturally the implementation here will vary based on what you expect your filter to do, but I hope you get the idea from this sample:

if (reportFilters.ContainsFilter(ReportFilterEnum.GenericFilter))

{

RegionFilter reportRegionFilter

= reportFilters.GetFilter(ReportFilterEnum.GenericFilter)

as RegionFilter;

// apply region filter

if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(reportRegionFilter.State) == false)

{

if (filterString.Length > 0)

filterString.Append(" AND ");

filterString.Append("State = '");

filterString.Append(reportRegionFilter.State);

filterString.Append("'");

}

else if (reportRegionFilter.CensusRegion != (int)CensusRegions.All)

{

if (filterString.Length > 0)

filterString.Append(" AND ");

filterString.Append(

RegionFilter.GetCensusRegion(reportRegionFilter.CensusRegion));

}

// Apply row filter

if (filterString.Length > 0)

view.RowFilter = filterString.ToString();

The result is a nice report with a custom filter:

More than one report in one Office Accounting add-in

Jorn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 03:21:00 GMT

I was asked If you need a new Report add-in for each report you want to add. I think it is a good question and one of the things you do not get for free in you generate your reports using the templates (there I had a chance to mention it again)

The answer is no, you can do that if you want to be able to install and remove them individually, but one driver can easily contain several reports.

The code you need to look at is the CreateReportDescriptors method in the ReportAddInDriver implementation (and the CreateReportCategories method if you want to add more than one report category).

Example:

public void CreateReportDescriptors(ISmallBusinessInstanceV2 smallBusinessInstance)

{

if (smallBusinessInstance == null)

throw new ArgumentNullException("smallBusinessInstance");

IReportDescriptorV2 descriptor

= smallBusinessInstance.CreateReportDescriptor("Report1", typeof(SBAReportAddInWithMoreReport1), SBAReportAddInWithMoreReport1.Guid);

descriptor.Caption = "Report 1";

descriptor.MappingType = ReportMappingType.NativeAddInRegistration;

descriptor.Save();

reportCategory.AddDescriptor(descriptor);

descriptor = smallBusinessInstance.CreateReportDescriptor("Report2", typeof(SBAReportAddInWithMoreReport2), SBAReportAddInWithMoreReport1.Guid);

descriptor.Caption = "Report 2";

descriptor.MappingType = ReportMappingType.NativeAddInRegistration;

descriptor.Save();

reportCategory.AddDescriptor(descriptor);

}

Simple, right? Just add a couple of lines of code adding the new report...

Do not get confused by the GUID that you have to supply here, the GUID identifies the driver not the report (you have to specify the same GUID on the category). I probably would not have put it in the member in the SBAReportAddInWithMoreReport1 class :o)

Performance optimized coding with the Office Accounting SDK

Jorn — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 02:46:00 GMT

Some things are more expensive than others when using the Office Accounting SDK, here is a few tips I have found along the way:

If doing bulk inserts or updates you will probably get better performance if you disable refreshing from the database...

We have three useful properties for this:

ISmallBusinessInstanceV2.DisableAsyncRefresh - Setting this to false will disable your DataViews from being refreshed with changes from other instances (~other clients). This is normally done asynchronously.

ISmallBusinessInstanceV2.SuppressRefresh – Setting this to false will disable your DataViews from being refreshed with changes from your own changes. This is normally done synchronously after you save.

IBaseMasterEntityV2.DisableReloadAfterSave – Setting this to true on your entity will disable a reload of the entity from the database after a save, this is useful is you just want to save and forget.

Your code will look something like this:

instance.SuppressRefresh = true;
try

{

…

Do your inserts and updates

…

}

finally

{

instance.SuppressRefresh = false;
instance.MarkAllMasterViewsAsOutOfDate();

}

If you are creating documents with inventory items, keep in mind that changing inventory back in time will make Office Accounting recalculate the inventory on later transactions. Now, I understand that if you have to do it you have to do it, but if you keep it in mind you may be able to reorganize your code to limit the recalculates (try to insert in a chronological order).

Be aware that when you call the DataView property on a IBaseMasterEntity you actually fetch all the rows of that type from the database, so only do that when necessary. One way to limit the number of calls to the property could be to cache the DataView in a variable so you don’t have to call the property again and again.

In many situations you can avoid reading the whole DataView to access the rows that you are interested in. Often you are really just interested in a few primary keys that will allow you to access the actual objects. One way to do this can be to access the EntityViews directly by selecting from the database. Generally we recommend going through the SDK however optimizing by reading from the database can be necessary, just keep in mind that the views potentially could change in future versions of Office Accounting.

Another useful cache in some applications: the ISmallBusinessInstance; if you have an application that often recreates the instance you may see a performance improvement by simply caching the instance and reusing it.

Naturally none of these tips can just be applied to code without thinking about scenarios, and more importantly; always remember to measure your performance to ensure you are actually improving and not just complicating things…