Best practices for AX 2012 report development

The upcoming sections will discuss the best practices for report development:

Report design

The following points must be kept in mind while developing reports:

• Use templates to design reports to provide a consistent report presentation across the system
• Use labels in caption and description properties for report controls
• Use auto design for all simple reports
• Use a proper report name so that it can be easily referred back to in AOT
• Use auto design for form-based reports, such as Invoice or Confirmation reports, where a field's position is set to a value instead of auto
• Include a report design in the report which is not used

AOT queries

Keep these points in mind while developing reports:

• Provide a field list while creating a query so that only required field values are selected
• Use a Query directly in a report which has multiple joins and grouping instead of using the RDP class

Data source table

The following best practices must be kept in mind while...