A report is a vehicle for organizing, processing, and displaying data in a format suitable for outputting to the user. Reports may be displayed on-screen in Preview mode, output to a file in Word, Excel, or PDF format (or, when appropriately designed, output in HTML, CSV or XML format), emailed to a user (or other consumer of information) or printed to hard-copy the old-fashioned way. All of the report screenshots in this book were taken from Preview mode reports.
Once generated, the data contents of a report are static. When an NAV 2017 Report is output in Preview mode, the report can have interactive capabilities. Those capabilities only affect the presentation of the data; they do not change the actual data contents included in the report dataset. Interactive capabilities include dynamic sorting, visible/hidden options and detail/summary expand/collapse functions. All specification of the data selection criteria for a report must be done at the beginning of the report run, before the report view is generated. NAV 2017 also allows dynamic functionality for drill down into the underlying data, drill through to a page, and even drill through into another report.
In NAV, report objects can be classified as Processing Only, such as report 795 Adjust Cost - Item Entries, by setting the correct report property, that is, by setting the ProcessingOnly property to Yes. A Processing Onlyreport will not display data to the user, but it will simply process and update data in the tables. Report objects are convenient to use for processing because the report's automatic read-process-write loop and the built-in Request page reduce coding that would otherwise be required. A report can add, change, or delete data in tables, whether the report is Processing Only or a typical report that generates output for viewing.
In general, reports are associated with one or more tables. A report can be created without being externally associated with any table, but that is an exception. Even if a report is associated with a particular table, it can freely access and display data from other referenced tables.