Hi, For one of our client (3.70), we want to provide an access for his customers from a web page, to launch few Navision reports. Some of the reports are customized. We know that our client will buy the Commerce Portal. We have to respect the following conditions:
The customer (user) needs to be able to select his own filters
The customer must have the results in a format he can work with (maybe he would like to use the information in Excel)
As an alternative, the report could be sent to him by email
Question 1: Can we use the Commerce Portal to do that kind of tasks. The customers should log in, select report, select filters, see the results. If so, does it requires a lot of customizations? Question 2: If having the solution with the Commerce Portal is not an easy task. Is there any cheap and effective way to provide this kind of access temporarily. I’ve seen in this forum that we could use NAS and launch the report and generate an email, but I’m not really sure about the details. For example, how could the user send the filters, and how oculd we skip the request form. Thanks in advance,
Hi David, Commerce Portal does not have this kind of functionality out of the box. It would have to be a custom solution to some extent. What you can do is use NAS and receive requests i.e. XML format with the report name and the filters for the report. Note that I think you need to have predefined filters fields defined, which is a limitation. Then you can submit the report back in HTML or XML (XML-HTML actually) to the web user using the SAVEASHTML or SAVEASXML methods available for reports. This isn’t too hard to develop if you are familiar with the technologies involved, but as mentioned above there are limitations - the filter fields for the reports. Hope this helps. Regards, Bruno
Thanks Bruno, I have to provide 2 time evaluations of the project, the first with the Commerce Portal and the second without. Since I never done that kind of customizations, anyone with experience got an idea? I have 3 to 10 reports to publish to the web (or by email).
David, The benifit you get from integrating the solution with Commerce Portal (CP) for this solution is that you have user logins and MSMQ and XML communication to handle web requests out of the box. However if this is the only thing they would use Commerce Portal for the that is not the way to go. It is fairly simple to build the solution your self and Navision provides tools for it in the Dev. kit (such as MSMQ components and sample code). Regards, Bruno