SSRS reporting - Upgrade to 10

Epicor ERP 10
1

Epicor version 9.05.701

There’s a likelihood we will be moving to E10 in either April 19 or April 20.

A lot of the changes in my job will be moving from crystal reports to SSRS.

Are there any good video links or walk through documents to show how to write a report from scratch? Connecting to the epicor server, bringing in tables and fields etc.

Thank you in advance.

2

I believe there is an SSRS university course that I have gone through. Apart from that, I will start by looking at some of the standard reports shipped by Epicor and modify them. On your report server, there is a CustomReport Folder, put all your customized reports there, it was suggested by my consultant.

To get started on Report builder, you can go through tutorial from Microsoft.

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3

Personal experience was when we initially started using SSRS, after having used Crystal which is an absolute scoosh, was who is the mad men that designed this crap. Done a tonne of reports since then and actually come to like SSRS, although the whole adding fields etc to an Epicor standard report definition and passing to SSRS is just bonkers.

Hopefully they have updated the Epicor University course as the version we had instructs you to create reports from scratch within SSRS with a direct connection to SQL server - this is not the recommended way of doing this anymore, not least if you are on hosted Epicor.

Check with your Epicor project manager, as I know from our experience and anecdotally for some other customers, Epicor will convert, free of charge some of the core outputs- invoice, route card, delivery note, purchase order to match your current format.

The free version of Power BI also works pretty well with Epicor if you want to easily create professional dashboards for access on phone/tablets etc

A 3rd party free tool called Report Sync is invaluable for moving reports between any test/pilot report collections and live.

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THIS!!!

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I took this course online - https://www.udemy.com/practical-sql-reporting-with-ssrs/
Quick, cheap, and easy. Good for setting up reports from scratch.

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Wise Owl Tutorials has some good videos as does Coda Bears.

We were all Crystal too. I was thinking there was a tool that could convert it but not sure. I just re-write mine since i needed to make changes. Not a big deal and gives me practice.

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Are most of these SSRS tutorials strictly from a SQL point of view? As opposed to how Epicor uses SSRS.

Being able to create an SSRS Report against a DB is great. But bulk of the hurdles (for people managing and using an E10 system) has to do with how to maintain SSRS reports that work with E10’s built-in RDD’s.

If you needed a tweak to the SSR (Stock Status Report), you’d be in for a huge uphill challenge to recreate that entirely in SSRS.

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They are from SQL but it helped me; SSRS was new to me.

I must not have that many as it sounds you do. I have not had many challenges with SSRS and like it better than Crystal.

I am sure some reports would be a battle f you have to re-write them.

Wasn’t there a tool that would cover the Crystal to SSRS??

9

You can get ODBC Crystal reports working in E10 if you’re really in a bind. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t. We with consultants help were able to get a couple complicated ones working while transitioning.

But SSRS was so limited and the interface clunky and difficult to use that we pretty much abandoned it to make our own report Web-Based with PHP. We can get much more customization and performance from our new solution than SSRS based stuff offers. We’ve never looked back. But not everyone has web programmers at their disposal.

Hope your reports are basic because if they aren’t you might have a bad time.

I even started writing a list of things I didn’t like about it:

  1. Can’t have multiple report files open in the same instance.
  2. Can’t re-order dataset fields automatically.
  3. Adding new fields to the dataset requires manually editing T-SQL in an ugly editor.
  4. The alley on the edit screen cannot be resized and the text and groupings are tiny and hard to read.
  5. Cannot have subreports in header or footer.
  6. Can only have comments at the end /not inline/ of expressions.
  7. Grouping information is hidden until you click on a group.
  8. Both outcomes in an IIF expression are evaluated even though only one of them is executed/output. Causes errors and makes you do tricky inline IF statements.
  9. Selecting items in the editor is a cumbersome and painful experience.
  10. MSDN for help or forums is a clunky hot mess.
  11. Can’t favorite a folder in the Reports Server intranet, you can only favorite individual reports.
  12. Expressions are reformatted automatically to remove line breaks when the report is closed and re-opened. This makes formatting expressions coherently virtually impossible.
  13. There is no “Format Painter” to copy the styles from one textbox to another easily.
  14. Cannot have rounded corners on your textboxes.
  15. Can’t tell a field to stop growing after X number of lines.
  16. Each new group you add adds a new column screwing up alignments.
  17. You cannot watermark or underlay sections
  18. There is no Report Header or Footer only page headers and footers.
  19. Every header & footer takes up the same amount on each page even if it’s only displayed on the first or last page!!!

Be prepared for the limitations.

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For anything that you push to the users, things that they do not open themselves - for example reports emailed at 3am to managers - you can continue to use crystal quite easily, just go into the report and change the data source location having created a new dsn to your epcior db’s - long term you want to migrate to ssrs but if you have a lot of reports to convert this will allow you to focus on the most important ones that users interact with first - obviously not an option if using hosted Epicor.