Our UK based company is doing some preparing for Brexit - we have a single customer based in the EU worth less than 5% of overall sales. We are assuming a worst case scenario and the customer has asked us to supply a modified packing slip with HS codes etc which we can do without issue but also a commercial invoice which we do not currently supply for any customer - we don’t have and cannot justify the Epicor Manifest solution.
I can create a baq report to create the commercial invoice and can load and print separately but what i was hoping to do was to mistake proof this process and that the commercial invoice would print for this customer when the packing slip generates - the packing slip auto-prints. I have looked at modifiying the packing slip and including the commercial invoice as a sub-report but given our packing slip formatting the only logical place to put this would be in the header or footer (commercial invoice essentially printing before or after the rest of the packing slip) but to the best of my knowledge you cannot put subreports in the SSRS header or footer.
I have started looking at a data directive bpm to auto-print the baq report - it is linked to the ship head table - marking pack slip as shipped already auto-prints the packing slip - however whenever I try and link this I get an error
From searching on this site I believe that I need to create an XML file with criteria for the baq report but I can find no specific guidance on how to do this - I have looked at the Education Courses we have.
Ultimately what I want to do is pass the packnum from the packing slip to the baq report and auto-print this - I was going to use a bpm data filed t capture this if need be.
Can someone in the know please let me know if what I am trying to achieve is doable and outline the process for auto-printing a baq report with criteria passed from an E10 form field…
Printing a report using a data directive is quite straightforward using the widget available in the Standard directives. So that part at least is very doable. Is it the widget you’re having trouble configuring?
BAQ Reports have some quirks and disadvantages though, mostly around limiting them to only what you need. I think what I would want to try in this case is creating an alternative report style based on the packing slip, with RDD additions if needed, instead of a BAQ report. It wouldn’t need to be part of the report style you’re already using.
Then a data directive could print exactly that report style with the parameters needed, and there would be the extra benefit that it could be printed manually on demand if necessary too, via the same methods people are already used to.
It was the widget that i was having trouble with as that is where the error occurs.
However based on what you are saying I will try your approach - can you tell me if I copy the packing slip report definition and add some of the fields that I need from other tables and associate this with a new report style - as long as the parameter fields that are passed to current packing slip are in place then the autoprint will work within the same autoprint bpm?
If I get what you’re doing then yes, the same settings will work - obviously you’ll need a separate widget to do the other print when needed, because the widget itself is configured to a specific report and report style, but you can apply all the same settings from the one that’s working to it.
We do this with Sales Order Acknowledgement for various things. The same basic report is already both an acknowledgement and a pro-forma invoice out of the box and we’ve re-purposed it for some other things too. They all work nicely within their own criteria.
